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

I withdraw that comment. It's a serious business and it's been clear for four years that there is no strategy. There is no trade minister. The previous finance minister announced in July that he was going. The Prime Minister has known for five months that he is going to have to get a cabinet reshuffle underway. He has downgraded the trade portfolio in the middle of a trade crisis. He has downgraded it and put it under the finance minister and under the Senate leader. I wonder when Australian exporters are going to get a trade minister who might actually focus on this growing crisis. We have backbenchers running foreign policy. The foreign minister is so weak. As I was saying before, she went on Insiders and announced the World Health Organization investigation because she needed an announcement. They couldn't actually just go on television for the morning and talk about their agenda or manage the foreign policy debate or talk about what the government is doing or achieving. They needed to make up an announcement. How well has that gone for us!

Not one single minister in this government in the last two years has been able to pick up the phone and call any of their counterparts in our biggest trading partner. What a stunning success that has been! Well done, government. There is no relationship at all. The foreign minister is so weak she has outsourced foreign policy to a bunch of the extreme backbenchers. They are the ones popping up on TV and trotting out the messages, mucking up the relationship. We've had private briefings—I won't say from whom but former heads at the very top of the government—from people who have served Labor and Liberal governments from the national security establishment who were scathing about the way the government has managed this. They observed that the World Health Organization announcement—a chest-beating call from the front, no diplomacy—was not in our national interest and undermined our national security. One thing they said to us very clearly which I've tried to take to heart when I talk on TV is that this relationship should be managed by adults—by the Prime Minister, by the foreign minister, by the opposition leader and by the shadow foreign minister—and just about everyone else should shut up. If only the foreign minister and the government had the strength to call these nutters in the government into line and stop trotting out their lines ,this country would be in a much better place.

As I said, diversification isn't easy but the government had the best opportunity, a serious opportunity, to look at diversification, which was the Varghese report from 2018 on India. The former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did a serious piece of work, a $1.5 million study, into how we could diversify our trade relations with India. What did that say? It said, 'There is no single market over the next 20 years that offers more growth opportunities for Australia than India'—not one. In 2018, the Prime Minister said, 'The government endorses the report and provides in principle support to its 20 priority recommendations.' What a great announcement. 'We are going to diversify trade with India. It's a great opportunity. That's what we're going to do.' What has happened two years on? Nothing. The government has implemented one recommendation out of 20 and they have wandered away from the rest. They have opened a new consul-general in Calcutta. That's it. That's all they have done. There is all this opportunity out there and all this need to diversify our trade relations. The government had the report and they loved the announcement, but they never delivered. It's yet another example of this government being addicted to the announcement—addicted to the marketing. The Prime Minister loves taking photos of himself. You know, he could've taken a trade adviser into his two weeks of quarantine in the Lodge, or his chief economics adviser or the Chief Scientist, and maybe learnt something, but no—he took his personal photographer, and subjected us all to photos of himself wandering around in shorts. It's a joke! This is not a serious government. It's a marketing department: spin; delivery; no outcome.

As I said, the government has no plan to diversify trade, no plan for jobs and no serious structural reform in the budget. They managed to spend $98 billion of new spending and run up over a trillion dollars of Liberal Party debt. There's nothing to show for it—not one serious piece of structural economic reform. What we get, in the middle of a trade crisis, is a bill from the government to change the rules in a scheme the Whitlam government introduced 46 years ago. Unbelievable!

In question time today we heard the education minister; he wandered up, and he was doing his audition, wasn't he? He wants to be the next trade minister—we read that in the Fin Review; we'll see what happens on Friday. He was doing his audition; he regaled us with figures and statistics, and he said: 'We're working on more free trade agreements.' Well, whoop-de-do! Anyone who knows anything about trade policy knows that we want global agreements, then we want regional agreements, and bilateral agreements can sometimes achieve something, and often they make things more confusing. There's been no honest auditing of all these free trade agreements they love to announce. No-one knows whether the outcomes are achieved. They just jump on to the next one and make another announcement. What about the hard work of the behind-the-border barriers, of the non-tariff barriers? If the government were to actually go and talk to exporters, instead of reading out their little talking points, they would understand that the biggest barriers for most exporters are not the tariffs anymore, in most of our markets. Those are not the barriers. It's the non-tariff barriers: the customs regulations; the extra checks; the standards; the cultural barriers. They're the things the government needs to focus on, instead of trying to think up their next announcement to get another free trade agreement.

Finally, I'll just share a word, in the last minute, for international education—our fourth biggest export sector, and, indeed, my state of Victoria's single largest export sector. Can you imagine the Prime Minister talking about any other export sector the way he has about international education?

An honourable member: 'Go home.'

'Go home.' He said to students: 'If you don't like it, go home.' He said that to a sector worth $40 billion to our country—$40 billion! It's a sector which relies on word-of-mouth marketing; we know that from the research. This is a sector with a 12-month/six-month pipeline. If students who are here feel welcome and have a good experience, they put it on social media and tell their family and friends, and more come. How do you think the students felt, being told by the national leader to go home? I spoke to the CEO of one of the accommodation providers who said that, the morning after, he had students at his front desk saying: 'I need to leave—where are the forms to leave?—because the Prime Minister told us to go home.' They heard that literally. How do you think they felt?

The government has taken no responsibility for helping our fourth-biggest export sector. Indeed, I know the Minister for Education. He tried. He hasn't called his counterpart in China for two years. He has taken some things to cabinet, but he gets rolled every time by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer.

I genuinely don't understand why the Prime Minister is hostile to international education. I remember a couple of years ago he said: 'If you can't get a seat on the bus or a lane to drive your car in, it's because of all the international students.' Unbelievable!

The government has no credibility on trade. They cannot say they're serious on trade, and if this is the extent of reform, in the middle of a trade crisis, then God help us!

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