Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I strongly support the amendment that has been moved by my colleague. I support the underlying thrust of the legislation but I certainly object to the removal of the industry forum, and I will go through each of these separately. I think it is really important for us to understand that we need antidumping laws because markets are not as perfect as people like to imagine. We know that an industry can be under attack from overseas competitors who flood a market with a product at below the cost it takes to develop that product. Of course, one of the advantages of doing that, particularly if you have small market like Australia, is that, for a relatively incidental cost for the company doing that, they can ensure that in that process they can eliminate some of their competition. So smaller countries like Australia, in particular, have to be very, very vigilant about this to ensure that our markets are not improperly and unfairly overrun. We do understand and support the fundamental notion that we are in a globalised economy, but, just as we have within our own country internal laws to prevent unfair competition and certain commercial practices which actually are anything other than equitable and fair, where people can use their position in the market to unfairly disadvantage their competition, likewise we need to do this in an international forum. It is a very real problem for us in Australia.

In Western Australia, one of the areas where there is strong concern about improper pricing of steel is in the lintel industry. Our standard technique of construction in Western Australia is somewhat different to the sticks that you hammer together in the eastern states. Our standard form of construction is double brick, and so we have a much higher strength lintel. Our manufacturers are very concerned that this galvanised product is coming in from China at about one-third of the price that it can be produced in Western Australia. There is concern that this is a galvanised product. Galvanisation is a risky process, where there needs to be a great deal of care, otherwise people can be injured. There is certainly a level of disbelief that that product is indeed being produced in China for that price. Unfortunately for many manufacturers, particularly the smaller outfits that we tend to have in Western Australia, the delays and the complexity involved in taking an anti-dumping case really militate against it being an effective remedy. The Steel Institute's James England, based in WA, said: 'The delays are the most costly part of the whole exercise. It is assumed the imposition of a tariff against dumped goods will stop the goods damaging our firms, but it is too late to act after the damaged good has been sold.' He went on to talk about how that underpriced good goes right through the supply chain, making it more and more difficult to take action against complex transformed products.

We support and welcome the government continuing the work that Labor has done. This is one of these areas where we have seen governments each building upon the initiatives of previous governments to strengthen these positions. In particular, some of the provisions in relation to making it easier to establish that there has been a breach and ensuring that remedy is available earlier are really important, because delay, as I said, is one of the great impediments to taking an action, as is the complexity. But these things will be totally ineffective if we are not properly resourcing the Australian Anti-Dumping Commission. I note with some concern that Australia's only solar panel manufacturer, Tindo Solar, are seeking to bring an action against the importation of certain crystalline silicon solar panels, which they believe—and they seem to have some evidence—are well below production cost and that many companies have collapsed or been absorbed in recent years as the global supply wreaked havoc through the solar manufacturing industry. So we have a situation where there is possibly a problem in China itself leading to our markets being flooded and our capacity for any local manufacturing of solar panels has arguably been compromised, but, for the second time, the Australian Anti-Dumping Commission has put off the investigation of this matter because it claims it simply does not have the resources given the heavy workload that it has. It is all very well to come in here and talk about a new legislative framework that is going to make it easier, but, if, as with the case of Tindo Solar, you cannot get any action taken because the entity does not have sufficient funds, it is all for naught. So I think that we are going to have to be very vigilant in ensuring that this legislation is something other than a hollow gesture and that the ADC is in a position to take the action that we are here empowering it to do.

I want to talk a bit about the other aspect of this, which is the abolition of the tripartite consultation body. This is a very, very disappointing example of a tendency that we have seen with this government—the extreme anti-union attitude that it has, which ultimately is in fact very destructive to our economy. When we established the International Trade Remedies Forum, it was a body that represented business and the unions. Indeed, one might argue that it had a singularity of interest here in ensuring that Australian manufacturing and agriculture in particular were being given a level playing field on which to compete. I know that, as has been said here previously, since the Abbott government has come to power the forum has not been active, and this has, I think, been to the detriment of business. When representatives came to Perth in the first half of 2013, after the body was formed, it was very useful for manufacturers to come to this forum to get a clearer understanding of what was going on and to know that their concerns as stakeholders were being taken into the heart of government.

I think that it is really interesting to compare this ideological, anti-union position that we have here in Australia with what we see in Germany. It is interesting to look at an article that was written last year entitled 'From sick man of Europe to economic superstar', which talks about Germany's resurgent economy, and how they have managed to survive. They have had their difficulties, but when you consider what else the rest of the Western world has been through, they have managed to, in some very trying circumstances, keep their economy afloat while bailing out and underwriting the economies of southern Europe.

The article talks about the distinctive characteristic of the labour market institutions—those employee associations, trade unions and work councils that have been established and which have underpinned German economic success. It really allowed Germany to react with much greater flexibility than we saw in other jurisdictions during the GFC. This is because they have a system that has buy-in from across the society. They have a system of wage floors which are negotiated periodically between trade unions and employer associations, typically at an industry or regional level. This really has been the corner-stone of furthering the common interests in improving productivity. They have, in these agreements, created a flexibility within the wage system to increase or decrease the hours of work, which really has been a major contributor to Germany being able to keep the unemployment rate low during the GFC. We can see that even under conservative administrations like Angela Merkel's there is an acceptance of the usefulness of having these tripartite arrangements—the usefulness of having every quotient in the industrial equation engaged in trying to solve these problems and trying to solve these issues.

Unfortunately, what we have here, is the reverting-to-type Abbott, primitive, conservative, old-school response to the fact of unions and their involvement. That is not a creative way to take our economy forward. I think that this is indicative of what we see the government doing. I understand there are a great number of tripartite bodies that this government are either dismantling or taking the union membership from. I think that will make government the poorer. Certainly, it will not boost our productivity or our effectiveness.

These anti-dumping laws are very important. We must make sure that we ensure—in our relatively small economy, operating in a global environment—that our manufacturers, agricultural producers, and service providers have a fair and proper basis for competing in that international community. I will make the comment: it amounts to nothing if we are not going to provide adequate resources to the ADC to implement the changes that we are going to be making here today.

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