Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to rise to speak on the Customs Amendment (Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement Implementation) Bill 2014 and related bill. It is very exciting to talk about the trifecta of success that the coalition government have delivered on free trade within our first year of coming to government. We have seen within, effectively, 12 months of the election the coalition government signing historic free trade agreements with Korea, with Japan and with China. This is good for the economy. This is good for consumers. It is good for exporters, but ultimately this is good news for job creation here in Australia.

These agreements will change the face of the Australian workforce for generations to come. In no short measure, these agreements provide new opportunities to the next generation of Australians to grow the products that go into the growing Asian market, and to deliver the services that the over a billion people that are coming into the middle class in Asia will require. If you were a young Australian today, these three agreements could ultimately change the jobs that you find across the working life that you might have. These are absolutely historic agreements. Here, in this Japanese agreement that we are discussing today, this is the first time that Japan has signed an agreement with a major exporter, particularly a major agriculture exporter. For beef, where we have got over a $5 billion advantage, for dairy, for horticulture and for nuts, the advantage that we have with Japan is an advantage that almost no other nation on earth has. If you are an Australian exporter going into the Japanese market, there is not another country that you are competing with that can compete in the same way that Australia can as a result of this historic agreement.

The minister for trade has just walked into the chamber and I congratulate him. He has become an absolute rock star of the coalition's first year in government, delivering things that many of our critics said could not be delivered. Here we stand, a very short period of time after the last federal election, with the delivery of three historic agreements.

Just recently, we saw the signing of the Chinese agreement and we got everything we wanted and more on agriculture, and that is great news for our country and great news for jobs. But the big thing in the Chinese agreement—and one that I think the public is just underestimating a little bit at the moment but in the decades to come will come to appreciate as transformative for our economy—is that we have access in the service side in health, in child care, in architecture and in law into the Chinese market. Again, no other country on earth has that level of access, where 100 per cent Australian owned companies can go into the Chinese marketplace and deliver these things. What this means is very simple: in a market of 1.3 billion people where literally millions of people are coming into the middle class, they are going to become consumers of our services, of our education services, of our childcare services, of our healthcare services and of architecture and of law. This is an enormous market, and the Chinese free trade agreement gives access into the Chinese market that effectively, in many cases, no other country on earth has in terms of advantage or that access. So I am very excited as part of the coalition government and as the chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties to be talking today about delivering on these three historic free trade agreements, something that is great for the economy, great for exporters, great for consumers and, above all else, will create thousands of new jobs across the decades to come here in Australia.

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