Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to support the Customs Amendment (Anti-dumping Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2015. I have spoken often in this place about Australia's anti-dumping regime. In the past I have been condemning it in saying how poorly it has served the Australian nation, particularly our small, medium and larger sized enterprises. But tonight I can stand here proudly and say that this coalition government has brought to an end the travesty of justice that too often was the experience of Australian manufacturers or suppliers of goods when it came to trying to have an anti-dumping regime delivered to stop dumped imports.

It is a fact that, for years, Australia's anti-dumping regime was considered virtually non-enforceable. We had company after company finding that it took forever to bring a case; that costs were prohibitive; that they were buried in red-tape. The government officials themselves did not seem to be interested. In fact, they seemed to take delight in finding no case to answer. I wonder if that was perhaps because, if there were a case brought against a decision in the WTO—a decision challenging Australia's decision to bring on an anti-dumping set of duties—that the government department would have to pay the cost of that particular challenge.

All of that is behind us I am very pleased and proud to say. I am also pleased and proud to say that a lot of the changes were brought through the experience and tenacity of the CEO of SPC Ardmona, Mr Peter Kelly. He had the most extraordinary experience at the height of the problems that surrounded the survival of the last Australian fruit processing company. He was trying to maintain exports, and at the time when the dollar was a little lower, the Australian canned fruits and preserved fruits were some 30 per cent of SPC Ardmona's earnings in the export markets. When the dollar went beyond parity with the US currency, those markets were lost and we saw a flood of imported, cheap and, too frequently, dumped product—tomatoes from Italy; peaches from South Africa; peaches from China—flooding into the Australian market. They were snapped up by supermarkets and the hospitality industry, who loved the big three-kilo cans of tomatoes, for example, which sold on average for $8 or $9 compared to $13 or $14 for the same sized can of Australian product.

The difference of course is that the Chinese imported cans of, say, peaches have been tested and have been found to contain levels of lead which are way above human tolerance and are very dangerous to health, particularly of the elderly, the young and those with compromised immunity systems. But the public was not to know that, given that all they saw was this product on our shelves. No antidumping actions were taken against them and hence the incredibly cheap prices that were simply added to the profit margins of, in particular, the two big supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths.

With this new regime that the coalition has ushered in, we are going to reduce the time for deadlines for submissions from 40 days to 37 days. Three days difference might not seem much, but this is the minimum time allowed under the WTO. Every day that you have dumped product accumulating in the big supermarket warehouses that will then be sold in competition against your Australian product, you can cut out from those transactions. It will serve the interests of your Australian industry.

The government are also going to crack down when overseas producers refuse to cooperate with antidumping investigations. It has been a bit of a joke in the past where you simply refuse to give information or you claim that the product that you were having investigated was different—for example, that it was organic tomatoes not non-organic tomatoes—and therefore should not be treated as like product. This was of course absurd and a nonsense, even when Coles stamped their cans of imported dumped tomatoes as 'Certified Australian Organic Consistent.' Indeed, there were no agreed organic guidelines at the time but Coles were very happy to put that label on the side of the product. It often confused the customer, who saw the word 'Australian,' picked up the can and imagined they were in fact consuming an Australian tomato product.

Also, if you have not given adequate information and have not responded to the request for data, we will proceed with the investigation based on the best information already supplied. That might be the information supplied by the Australian industry bringing the case. To me, that seems only fair. For too long it has been all the other way.

We will strengthen enforcement of the provisions of the WTO agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures. This will be implemented by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which represents Australia at the WTO and other international forums. This will give us a stronger stance internationally and more transparency on foreign subsidies, including those identified during antidumping investigations. Let me say that when the antidumping case was brought against Italian canned tomatoes by SPC Ardmona, of the some 90 separate importers investigated, about 88 or so of those were found to be dumping the product—in other words, selling it below the normal price that was charged in the home country. But two of the companies got away with it. They were found to have dumped but below two per cent, so they did not have the dumping duties applied to their product. It just so happened that those two exporting brands constituted more than half the market in Australia.

One argument used at the time by SPC Ardmona was that the antidumping agency had not taken into consideration the subsidies that were embedded in the low prices that the Italian tomato manufacturers could pay to their growers. Under the EU agricultural reform policies they were receiving subsidies, which could then be passed on to the manufacturer in the form of very cheap raw material for canning. The SPC Ardmona case has now been brought back against the remaining two large Italian exporters of tinned tomatoes. This time the subsidies embedded in the products will be given proper examination. So there we see how the antidumping regime has evolved in Australia to be fairer, more transparent and will now more closely conform to WTO guidelines and benchmarks.

The government will also provide better advice to Australian businesses with a hotline. We will enhance the support services with the International Trade Remedies Adviser, in particular, by increasing the number of advisers. We will establish an antidumping information service, to provide new information about products including market analysis. All of this is very important because too often in Australia, as I said before, we have seen poor representation of Australia's interests by the antidumping agency, until these amendments came into being.

With the previous regime, we also had a culture of not appearing to care. I have a lot of faith in the new director in particular. I think he has national interests at heart. But I am also pleased to see that we will no longer always take the side of the imported product, because let me give you one short story. At the height of the dumping activity in Australia, when the dollar was so high, when we were in the middle of the worst drought on record, there was a huge volume of imported peaches from South Africa. They came into the country and ended up on our supermarket shelves. Both Australia and New Zealand at the same time were requested to consider bringing in antidumping duties by their respective industries. In the case of New Zealand that antidumping regime immediately found on behalf of the New Zealand fruit growers that this South African peach product was dumped. They immediately reimposed antidumping duties that had in fact been in place before.

At the same time, the Australian antidumping regime, looking at the same product and the same complaints, ruled that there was some antidumping action but that the Australian company simply had to get over it. They were not going to have the support and the fairness of imposing antidumping duties against the South African tinned peach product and it could continue to flood into the Australian market. And it did.

Very recently there was an extraordinary news item out of South Africa, which trumpeted the fact that the South African consumer protection and competition agency itself was fining these companies that Australia had let off the hook for anticompetitive behaviour in export markets. Here was South Africa saying their own companies had not done right by their behaviour in export markets, and they, therefore, fined them. Yet Australia's own antidumping regime had let these same companies off the hook, while New Zealand had set antidumping duties to protect its own industry. That is a classic case of how poor Australia's antidumping regime has been in the past.

Under the previous government, they did not seem to care. They just simply had the attitude that anything that gives cheap product to the Australian consumer will do. They seemed to share the same notion as Coles and Woolworths that down down, everyday, low prices best serve the Australian grocery buyer. Unfortunately, we have seen in very recent days that that cheap, down down, everyday, low price can sometimes lead to very serious problems with food safety when a company disguises the true country of origin of that food, made from local and imported ingredients, by poor labelling.

We have had the hepatitis A outbreak in imported frozen berries from China. I mentioned the lead in the tinned peaches, and they were assessed and found to be contaminated over 12 months ago. There has been more recent testing of tinned peaches from China where arsenic and lead are under very close scrutiny. I am very fearful because, in particular, the big hospitality size cans of this product, typically, are served to people in institutions like hospitals, prisons, the armed forces, Defence forces, school canteens and other types of public institutions, and those products are fed to people without them being able to check a label and see what its country of origin is. I have said that we have real contamination issues with heavy metals. But there are also other problems like biological contaminations, such as with Escherichia coli, which is an indicator of faecal contamination, and hepatitis A.

So we have had a whole raft of problems affecting the Australian food manufacturers when they have had to compete against cheap, dumped, imported product with few fair and reasonable results being delivered by the previous antidumping regime. They have had to deal with complex, confusing and probably deliberately non-transparent labelling laws, which allowed a lot of the imported, dumped, cheap product to compete with Australian product without its actual origins being well known and well understood by the buyer. We have also had a problem of poor food security checking at our border. We have product coming into the country now which has serious food safety issues associated with it.

This recent scare of hepatitis A in frozen berries, accompanied by the arsenic and lead contamination in more imported canned fruit products, combined with this new and improved antidumping regime, spells a new potential capacity to compete for our Australian manufacturers. Whether they are in the business of making aluminium, car parts or clothing, we have to have fair play. The World Trade Organization understands this and they have had rules in place for a very long time. Australia has been gutless in the past. We are courageous on the battlefields. We are courageous on the sporting grounds. When it has come to sticking up for Australian enterprise, we have run away. We have hidden our heads for reasons that are quite beyond me. I commend this Customs Amendment (Anti-dumping Measures) Bill (No. 1) 2015 to the House. I hope that we will never again see the cowardly behaviour of an agency like we had for too long in the form of the Australian antidumping regime.

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