Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will say at the outset that I support the Export Market Development Grants Legislation Amendment Bill 2020. It makes a series of sensible administrative changes to an important longstanding scheme, the Export Market Development Grant scheme, which is actually a Whitlam government scheme from 1974. I'm only one year older than this scheme, and it's certainly stood the test of time.

The independent review, I might stress, is not the government's ideas; they haven't come up with these ideas. They quite sensibly had an independent review, spoke to hundreds of businesses and took that expert advice. The review found that the policy intent of the scheme has stood the test of time. For over 40 years this scheme that the Whitlam Labor government introduced is still a sound piece of policy. But, as you'd expect, there's a range of changes as the economy changes—as the nature of our markets and exporters change, so must the scheme change in an administrative sense. The idea of having upfront payments to provide greater certainty to businesses is a sensible one. In a past life I used to work in the Victorian government in trade and investment. I've run trade missions around the world. I've spoken to businesses and tried to help them in the Victorian context, and there was a lot of frustration with this scheme that people couldn't actually run a cash flow or bank on it. They had no idea what they were going to get. It was like a little lottery that they might win or they might lose. They've lowered the threshold, which is a controversial recommendation in some senses, but it does, so the government says and so the review says, better target the available dollars to SMEs by lowering the cap from $50 million to $20 million and creating two streams: businesses new to export and those wanting to expand export.

That's all sensible as far as it goes, but I do want to return my remarks to the second reading amendment. I listened to the previous speaker. He said we're doing well as a nation in trade. It is self-congratulatory prattle from the government. He's obviously content rich, but I can see why Christopher Pyne sent him here: it's so we'd miss Christopher! It was certainly an antidote to my insomnia. I was thinking of getting a podcast! But there's a serious and growing crisis with this government. The self-congratulatory prattle—oh, everything's fine in trade; there's nothing to worry about. It's almost like there's not a trade crisis. It's almost like there are not 80 ships sitting off the cost of China with over $1 billion of our export just sitting there, going nowhere. We could apply the Prime Minister's comeback slogan, couldn't we? 'Come back, ships. They don't want you. We've stuffed up the relationship so badly. Come back. We'll do something else.'

It's ridiculous. Mogadon speaker after government muppet gets up and says: 'Oh, we're doing really well on trade. It's all going swimmingly. It's all tickety-boo.' Well, it's not. Have a look at the facts under this government in its eighth year. Here are three key metrics. SMEs are 14 per cent of our nation's trade exports. Compare that to the G7 nations: 25 per cent. The European Union average is 35 per cent. The government's fiddling with a Whitlam government scheme. The amount of funding, though, matters in the scheme. You haven't put enough funding into it. This is your eighth year in government. You put, I think, another $37 million in as a COVID boost—panic, panic. 'Let's put some money in the scheme. All of a sudden we can spend money.' The funding was $240 million. When Paul Keating left office it was $270 million. Twenty-three years ago there was vastly more money in real terms in this scheme, and the government's fiddling with the rules, saying, 'Oh, haven't we done a good job?'

This is the spin versus the reality from this government. It's a marketing department masquerading as a government. There's nothing serious happening over there, just another announcement. 'Oh, look: we've announced. We changed the rules in the scheme the Whitlam government introduced,' but have a look at the outcomes. Fourteen per cent of our trade exports are from SMEs. It's not good enough. Have a look at our export complexity. Under this government we have a serious problem with our export complexity. Our exports, our trade, are far too narrowly focused and concentrated on a very few things that we export. So of course the headline figure for trade has gone up: people are buying this year a whole lot more of our iron ore. But, if you take that out of it, we're not doing well. That comes and goes. The headline figures that the government is trumpeting disguise a serious underlying problem with our trade and export profile. They haven't done anything about it; they just love making announcements. We are too dependent on a small number of exports.

This is not a new problem. It's not an easy problem to fix. But we don't value-add enough. We're now 93rd in the world for trade export complexity, behind Kazakhstan, Uganda and Senegal. That's not good enough. We're an advanced OECD economy, the 13th largest economy in the world, and we are far too dependent on a very narrow slice. There's no single solution, but there is a role for government—a much more creative, thoughtful role for government in industry and trade policy than we've seen over there. All they want to do is cut things.

Have a look at market diversification. That's the big one at the moment, isn't it? In their eighth year in government all of a sudden they're running around, going: 'Oh, we need to diversify away from China. This is a new thing. Look what we discovered.' It's not a new thing. People have been talking about this age of disruption between our biggest security partner and our biggest economic partner for years. If you talk to the experts, if you talk to business, if you talk to the academics or if you listen to your own bureaucrats for the government, they'd be saying, 'Amber light flashing; we have a market concentration problem here.' But you need to do more than just say 'diversify'. You actually need to do something.

So how is all the talk about diversification working out? Not very well. Like I said, we've got 80 Australian ships—well, they're not Australian; we got rid of the shipping industry. But there are 80 ships with Australian coal sitting off the coast of China with over $1 billion of our product not welcome, not let in. As I said, there is the comeback slogan. 'Come back, ships. Come back to shore. Come back to Australia. We've stuffed the relationship. They won't let you in.' The Prime Minister has got that little thing. Remember what we saw after he stopped the boats when he was the immigration. He stopped the boats. He has that little ship sitting on his desk, 'I stopped the boats.' Xi Jinping will need a whole new palace to put all the boats of Australian exports in that he's stopped! This is a serious matter. This is a serious relationship. The threats to our trade relationships are deadly serious. Of course, our sovereignty and our values must come first. But it has been crystal clear for years under this do-nothing government that we may face this situation and now the government just looks confused. It's as if we didn't have the former Prime Minister running around gratuitously insulting our biggest trading partner with, 'Shanghai Sam.' It's domestic politics at every turn for the Liberal Party, particularly this Prime Minister who is very, very good at politics. You have to hand him that. His very, very good at politics. But it's as if every time it matters in the national interest domestic politics doesn't trump the national interest.

We found out, shockingly, the announcement by the foreign minister about the World Health Organization, which was widely panned by the national security establishment. We didn't have to go and poke our biggest trading partner in the eye. We could have been more diplomatic and said, as Kevin Rudd observed, 'How about we do a study.' How you frame stuff matters. How you talk to people matters.

See this speech in context