Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Trade and Competitiveness. Will the Minister advise the House of the outcomes from the APEC meeting held in Russia over the weekend? What benefits might flow for Australia from these outcomes?

Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade and Competitiveness) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for her question and for her ongoing interest in innovation, which was a very strong theme at the APEC meeting. By any standard, the APEC meeting in Vladivostok over the weekend was very successful indeed, and I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight two of the very important outcomes from that meeting. The first relates to a list of environmental goods on which the APEC members agreed tariffs would be limited to no more than five per cent. The purpose of this is to promote the flow of products that are used to preserve, protect and clean up our environment, with a very strong emphasis on climate change to ensure that we have effective policies for dealing with the challenge of climate change. This is an initiative that was initiated at Big Sky, Montana, more than a year ago. The leaders asked trade ministers to take this forward. I am pleased to advise that Australia was able to play a role in brokering this deal. We ended up with 54 such items, including wind turbine blades, solar cells, solar hot water systems and equipment used in the generation of electricity from renewable energy sources. I was asked about the potential benefits of this for Australia. We had a look at the 54 items, and Australia already exports $1.2 billion worth of these items, which is a substantial sum. But, for the APEC community as a whole, the trade in those items is $432 billion, so this opens up tremendous opportunities for Australian producers of these environmental goods.

The second area, which is also right up Australia's alley, is that of university education. Russia has initiated the idea of a work program to promote the movement of students and academics from university to university around the region and to establish campuses in each other's universities—an inspired choice by Russia. We were able to bring that work program to a position where all leaders endorsed it. There are 176,000 university students from the APEC community studying in Australia right now. Education is our third biggest export. It still substantially beats LNG. I think this is great news. Ten billion dollars of the $16 billion of our education exports comes from the APEC community. This is the education revolution here in Australia being implemented more broadly, and it is certainly consistent with the white paper Australia in the Asian century. It is a very good outcome for all.