House debates
Monday, 17 November 2014
Address by the President of the People's Republic of China
3:36 pm
Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I invite members and senators to take their seats and, on behalf of the House, I welcome as guests the President of the Senate and honourable senators to this sitting of the House of Representatives to hear an address by his Excellency, Mr Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China.
His Excellency Xin Jinping having been announced and escorted into the chamber—
Mr President, I welcome you to the House of Representatives chamber. Your address today on this significant occasion makes history in this House.
3:39 pm
Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Madam Speaker and Mr President, it is a joy to have friends come from afar. With free trade negotiations concluded and with a comprehensive strategic partnership established, this is a historic and memorable day.
No Chinese President has ever known more about Australia than President Xi. Tomorrow, when he completes his visit to Tasmania, he will have visited every single one of our states and territories. This President of China is, in fact, more widely travelled in our own country than most Australians! But it runs in his family. Thirty-five years ago, the President's father, Xi Zhongxun, visited New South Wales as party secretary of Guangdong Province. The President's father visited markets, farms, ports, docks, factories, schools and research institutes, and along with the then New South Wales Premier Neville Wran he signed a joint declaration on Guangdong-New South Wales friendship and cooperation. It was the first official sister-state relationship between Australia and China, and it was so successful that 80 sister-state and sister-city relationships have subsequently been concluded. Just as the friendships between our cities and our states have flourished, our national friendship and cooperation has grown and prospered. Xi Zhongxun saw the potential of our two peoples working with each other and learning from each other.
Today, we should also remember the foresight of the father of Australia's modern relationship with China, Prime Minister Whitlam. When he established diplomatic relations with China, our two-way trade was 1/1,500th of what it is today. So we acknowledge Prime Minister Whitlam—you on the other side might at least say, 'Hear, hear'—just because I say it!—and all the leaders of our countries who have put aside ideology to see Australians and Chinese as people with common interests and shared aspirations for a better life. Yes, Australia and China have different systems of government. One is a young country; the other is an ancient one being renewed. But we have become a model of how two peoples and two countries can complement each other. We are testament to the saying that a wise man seeks harmony, not conformity.
In April this year, I saw firsthand Chinese ships and planes working together with those from Australia, Japan, Korea and Malaysia, on the sea and in the sky searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. In the saddest of circumstances, our peoples worked side by side to seek resolution to this baffling mystery. We mourn the loss of the 154 Chinese passengers, along with the six Australians and 79 others on board. To the Chinese families of those who were lost, I promise that we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery.
Two of those on Flight MH370 were Chinese Australians. They were two of almost one million Australians of Chinese background. Chinese people first came to Australia in large numbers during the gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s. Not all of them returned home once the diggings were exhausted. Even before the Great War there were more than 20,000 Chinese Australians, and at least 198 of them enlisted to fight for king and country. Four won the Distinguished Conduct Medal and 14 won the Military Medal as members of the First Australian Imperial Force.
In every part of our national life, Australians of Chinese ancestry have helped to build our modern nation. Around this parliament today there are members and senators of Chinese ancestry. Professor John Yu is a former Australian of the Year. Dr Victor Chang was our foremost heart surgeon. His school report card said:
Victor conquered language difficulty to obtain matriculation; gave us all an example of persistence: now doing Medicine at the University.
This is the story of the Chinese in Australia. All of them form a human arch, connecting us to what Prime Minister Menzies first called 'our near North'.
Earlier this year I led the largest and most high powered delegation ever to leave this country for the inaugural Australia Week in China. With me were two ministers, five premiers and a chief minister, the chairmen or CEOs of companies worth 50 per cent of the value of our stock exchange and hundreds—literally hundreds—more business people. Chinese direct investment in Australia, with just 23 million people, is only a little less on some data than Chinese direct investment in the United States, with more than 300 million people.
This is very significant. We trade with people when we need them but we invest with people when we trust them. A relationship might begin with commerce but it rarely ends there once trust has been established, as I believe it has between Australia and China. Trade and investment have made China wealthy. The advance of hundreds of millions of Chinese from subsistence to the middle class in just 40 years is probably the greatest material advance in all of human history. China is richer and stronger and the whole world is richer and stronger as a result.
China is by far Australia's largest trading partner. Indeed, China is now the largest trading partner for more than 100 countries. But trade and investment are just one part of how we help each other. For at least a decade, over 100,000 Chinese students a year have been learning in our universities and from our experts. But from next year under the New Colombo Plan, Australia will start to return the compliment, with thousands of young Australians soon to be studying in China. They are our new ambassadors to China and to the region.
The success of Australia's G20 presidency owes a very great deal to China's like-minded leadership of APEC over the past year. Australia was only able to mobilise G20 members to make specific policy commitments to deliver inclusive growth and jobs, and freer trade, because China was already pursuing similar goals. On behalf of Australia, I thank President Xi for his personal contribution in Brisbane. I congratulate China for hosting the G20 in 2016 and I am sure that under China's presidency the world will build on the Brisbane action plan for growth and jobs.
As President Xi told the G20 just two days ago, 'If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.' This is true of Australia and China. It is true of Australia and the world, because all of us have a long journey to make and only one planet to share. Our challenge is always to seek the best in each other. We are all walking into the future and, provided we stay together, there is no limit to how far we might go.
Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I call the honourable Leader of the Opposition to support the remarks of the Prime Minister.
3:49 pm
Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Thank you, Madam Speaker. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and all the ancient custodians of our continent whose ancestors bartered with Macassan trepangers supplying Chinese markets hundreds of years ago.
President Xi and Madam Peng, you honour us with your presence, and it is my pleasure on behalf of the opposition to welcome you to our parliament. Mr President, I know that you are fond of the Chinese proverb, 'a good neighbour is not to be traded for gold'—for millennia, Australia and China have been neighbours; for decades, we have been partners; and today again we confirm that we are firm friends.
As opposition leader and then as Prime Minister, it was the late great Gough Whitlam who first reached out to China diplomatically. He ended a generation of lost contact and began a thriving partnership, now in its fifth decade. Before Whitlam, two-way trade between our countries was less than $100 million. There was not a single student from the People's Republic of China at an Australian university—not one. When I visited China 40 years later, as part of Prime Minister Gillard's delegation, our trading relationship was worth more than $100 billion. Today, more than 90,000 Chinese students study at Australian campuses. Every generation of Chinese and Australian leadership owns a share of that success. Our world economy is more interconnected and more interdependent, and ours is a relationship of diverse and shared prosperity—in tourism, agriculture, energy, services, mining and education. And today, Labor welcomes the prospect of a trade agreement between our two countries. A decade of hard work has gone into creating this opportunity for Australia, from Prime Minister Howard to Prime Ministers Rudd and Gillard, and now Prime Minister Abbott. We look forward to examining the detail of the final agreement. We believe in open markets and liberalised trade—driving economic growth, creating jobs, expanding the middle class, raising living standards and eradicating poverty. We believe in bilateral agreements. We believe also in subregional and multilateral trade agreements, and we believe that multilateral processes should always be open to each other, not opposed. We commend the important progress in last week's very successful APEC summit in Beijing. But of course, our relationship runs deeper than trade. We need to keep nourishing the people-to-people links, and to make life easier for students and tourists, from the flexibility of visas to the time it takes to obtain and process them.
My first visit to China was in 1992 as a student backpacker. I saw firsthand the earlier stages of the powerful and remarkable transformation that we celebrate today. Your journey has been a journey from poverty to prosperity; from inwardly-focused, agrarian economy to global economic superpower—to international leadership; and a journey that has lifted and liberated more than half a billion of your people from poverty, and changed our world for the better. And we all take heart from the fact that decades of economic growth and trade liberalisation have encouraged the real and important advancement of human rights, political freedoms, and the rule of law—long may they continue!
On some IMF estimates, in early October this year—the Year of the Horse—China quietly reclaimed its place as the world's largest economy. China's leadership of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and increased engagement with other multilateral institutions is an unambiguously good thing for the world. The same leadership has driven your work on counterterrorism and combating corruption, and the generous and timely contribution you have made to the fight against Ebola in West Africa, lending vital assistance since April including providing 500 trained staff. And on Wednesday, 12 November, you stood side by side with the President of the United States to affirm your commitment to ambitious new international action on climate change—one of the defining environmental, economic and security issues of our age. We congratulate you on your vision and your ambition, and we look forward to building a clean energy future with China.
Mr President, I can assure you that I and Labor are committed to building an international relationship of mutual trust—a partnership pursuing harmony. We do not see diplomacy as a zero sum game. We do not seek to rank one friendship at the expense of another. Mr President, Madam Peng, 70 years ago soldiers from our two countries fought together for our national survival. We will never forget the courage and kindness of Chinese locals who risked so much to provide desperately needed medicine and supplies to Australian prisoners of war on Hainan Island and elsewhere. They, along with generations of Chinese visitors and migrants, have a special place in the Australian story—not just legendary Anzacs like Billy Sing or pioneering surgeons like Victor Chang, but the more than 300,000 Chinese Australians who make our nation a smarter, richer, more diverse and more interesting destination. Many of them started their lives in Australia working long hours and late shifts; now they are small-business owners and corporate leaders. They enrich our communities and their children star at school prize-givings and in our universities.
Ours has always been a relationship of beneficial exchange. It was Chinese gold-diggers who took back the seeds of the gum trees that you see from the train between Hong Kong and Guangzhou; 19th century miners who saw department stores in Melbourne and Sydney and created major new businesses in Shanghai and Guangzhou; engineering graduates who have built China's world-leading solar industry; and economics graduates who are playing major roles in the discussion of your economic future reforms. We thank you for your visit and we hope, most of all, that you take home fond memories of our nation. You are most welcome here; you always will be.
Honourable senators and members: Hear, hear!
Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Mr President, it gives me great pleasure to invite you to address the House.