Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Hansard source

I want to put on record how important it is for pieces of legislation like these, the Customs Amendment (Australia-United Arab Emirates Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement Implementation) Bill 2025 and Customs Tariff Amendment (Australia-United Arab Emirates Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement Implementation) Bill 2025, to pass this parliament. We are a trading nation, and there will be much commentary over the coming months and years as countries like Australia respond to the United States' new tariff policy. Historically, it's not unusual for the United States to adopt a form of protectionism, nor is it unusual for Europeans and others to adopt a form of protectionism. But there are a couple of important lessons for Australia which must be mainstays of our trade policy going forward.

I note that the opposition's trade spokesman, Kevin Hogan, has been doing a great job here in presenting a very cogent analysis as we have been responding to the United States' tariff policies, which you would have to say are quite volatile policies at the best of times. One of those lessons is that the subsidisation of industry should be avoided at all costs. The nation went through a very difficult period in the eighties and nineties, when the Hawke government did the right thing and started to bring down the tariff wall and ended the policy of industry subsidisation. That is an important lesson for today, because initiatives to subsidise industry where government is picking winners—as we have seen from this Future Made in Australia policy—are destined to fail. It's throwing money—taxpayers' funds—at businesses and, frankly, misses the point of the role of government. The role of government is to ensure that a country can be competitive and can then concentrate on its comparative advantages. We need to have some sophistication as we respond to these huge policy ructions from the United States, and the subsidisation of industry must be avoided at all costs.

The other thing we must do—and this has been put on record by Mr Hogan—is find more avenues to diversify our trade. We will always be a trading nation and we have a relatively small domestic population, which relies on trade very heavily. In fact, any attempt to try and compare the economic positions of the United States and Australia really does miss this key point, I've noticed. The United States is a very large domestic market, sure, but it's also a trading nation. But it can get away with a lot of crazy ideas which we would be killed by. So we have to show fidelity to free trade. We must, as these bills propose to do, find ways to liberalise and open up new markets. We should always look to eliminate barriers to trade beyond the border and we must, at all costs, avoid the subsidisation of industry.

This is a disastrous policy, and, for a government that is a Labor government, it needs to go back and look very carefully at the policies of the Hawke government, which were the reverse of a lot of this government's industry subsidisation policies we see today. Mr Chalmers is a great devotee of the Hawke government. I think he's done some sort of doctoral thesis on the Hawke government. He might need to dig up this thesis. If he does so, he will find that the Hawke government eliminated the subsidisation of industry and brought down the tariff war, which is the reverse of what the Future Made in Australia policies will be doing in part.

I am very conscious that a lot of false comparisons between Australia and America are made in the public domain. Of course, we are culturally very alike, and America is one of our most important friends, but we are fundamentally different economies, and we cannot entertain any form of protectionism, nor should we ever entertain any form of industry subsidisation as we have seen canvassed in these past few months.