Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Customs Amendment (China-Australia Free Trade Agreement Implementation) Bill 2015 and the Customs Tariff Amendment (China-Australia Free Trade Agreement Implementation) Bill 2015 and acknowledge the significant moment this represents, both in the economic history of our country and in the way in which this parliament has operated to deliver the best outcome that we can deliver in terms of the way in which the China free trade agreement will operate.

The Australia in the Asian century white paper that was delivered by the former Gillard government was, in my view, one of the most important economic narratives that came from the Rudd-Gillard era. Its thesis was that, as a small country of 23 million people, we were unlikely to be able to maintain our standard of living unless we were an active trading nation and that what we had on our doorstep was the most significant social phenomenon that we are seeing in the world today, and that is the rise of the Asian middle class, and we are particularly seeing that in China. That represents an enormous opportunity for the Australian economy in terms of providing both goods and services to that rising middle class, in circumstances where ours is of course an economy geared to providing goods and services to our own middle class. You cannot be in that space without having a free trade agreement with China, which is why we have, on this side of the House, always supported the idea of a China free trade agreement and why we pursued that throughout the Rudd-Gillard era.

And all of that, of course, is an extension of what you saw during the Hawke-Keating governments—a much greater integration between Australia and the East Asian economies. We saw that with the establishment of APEC, which was one of the critical achievements of the Hawke-Keating era. You can go back further, to the Whitlam government. Indeed, Gough Whitlam as Leader of the Opposition in 1971 visited China—

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