from the Hon Tim Fischer MP,
Deputy Prime Minister anf Minister for Trade.Earlier this year, I had great pleasure as Trade Minister in announcing that Australia exported $104.4 billion worth of goods and services in the financial year just ended.
It was a record performance - the biggest export cheque we have ever registered.
More than that, 1996-97 was the first time ever we have recorded a surplus in both merchandise and services trade in the same year. Rural exports, non-rural exports and services exports were all up by more than six percent - and our share of world markets also rose to a level we have not seen for many years.
Results such as this do not happen by accident. It needs three things: a hell of a lot of hard work by an active export sector, an Australian Government dedicated to providing the framework for export growth, and a community with a healthy export ethic.
Australian firms continue to find more and more products to export, and more and more markets to export into. Fresh milk is being flown to Hong Kong every day, from Victoria and Northern Queensland. We are selling computer software systems to Thailand, rotary dairies to Germany, and telecommunications systems to Argentina.
The composition of our export trade also has been changing as companies explore new markets and new opportunities. Our exports of information technology and telecommunications doubled between 1992 and 1996.
And over the past decade our exports of services have grown 50% faster than our imports of services.
What has also happened is that the focus of Australian trade has changed, as the focus of international trade has changed.
We have shifted our export focus from Europe and America toward Asia, as the focus of international trade growth has shifted toward Asia.
The Government's role in export is to facilitate. This Government has been very keenly focussed on doing that.
On the tariff front, four specific tariff reductions have been achieved for the agri-food industries - to Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Some have been for single commodities, others across a range of commodities as in the case of Indonesia.
Further reductions are on the way as more countries seek to join the World Trade Organisation. Taiwan for instance is progressively cutting tariffs on 800 items, covering just about everything we already export or are ever likely to export to them.
On market access, we have won improvement for Australian exports going to Brazil, China, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the USA, and the European Community itself.
So we have an export sector that is keen to expand, and a Government committed in principle, and in practice to helping that sector.
But there seems to be a question whether the export ethic has taken hold through the Australian community in the way we might hope.
The debate now taking place about tariffs, protection, and trade liberalisation suggests that some people in Australia in fact have not developed much in the way of an export ethic.
And since the last election we have seen the birth of the One Nation Party. A party with a leader who seems to have no concept of an export ethic, and which has acted as a focal point for people who return to the days of high protection in Australia.
To the extent that One Nation has any policies - and this party has been notable for being very loud in complaining, but silent on real solutions - its attitude to trade seems to be to turn inward; throw up the import barriers, offend our major trading partners, and pretend that we can generate jobs and growth from the domestic market alone.
I have said many times that the One Nation and Hanson agenda is in the first place morally reprehensible, and secondly just plain dumb in terms of Australia's interests.
In Australia we grow more than we can eat, and we produce more than we can use. We simply don't have - and never will have - enough people to use the excess, and we have to export it to make the money to support our standard of living.
To do that, to make our money from exports, we have to compete. And trade liberalisation is the driving force that helps us compete with the rest of the world.
It helps us focus on producing the goods we are best at producing. It gives our producers better access to leading edge technology, so they compete more effectively. It has helped our manufacturing sector become more competitive.
One of the great furphies of the trade liberalisation debate is that our manufacturing industries can not compete without protection.
That is rubbish. The facts are that protection for our manufacturing industries has halved since the early 1980s. In that time manufacturing exports have trebled. That's the reality of the situation.
We can compete in the world without protection - we do compete in the world without protection, and we are competing better as protection reduces.
Another great furphy is that protecting industry means protecting jobs or, put another way, that trade liberalisation means loss of jobs.
Again, that is not borne out by reality. Trade liberalisation has helped our exports grow over the last decade, from about 15 per cent of GDP to about 20 per cent of GDP now.
Thousands of new jobs have been created in the process, in industries as diverse as agriculture to auto parts, shipbuilding to software, heavy engineering to health services.
Exporting firms increase employment faster than do non-exporting firms, and our exports to Japan alone - our largest market - account for 345,000 jobs right here in Australia.
It is simply wrong to say that tariffs save jobs. The reason that jobs are reduced in manufacturing - in virtually any industry - is that people are replaced by technology.
As an example, employment in the textile, clothing and footwear (TCF) industries has been falling since the 1960s. TCF employment fell steadily from the mid æ70s to the mid æ80s, while the effective rate of industry assistance doubled and trebled. And TCF employment fell just as steadily from the mid æ80s while the effective rate of assistance was wound down.
Another false perception is that Australia has been crazy in going it alone down the liberalisation road. It is ironic that exactly the same perception is held by some people about their own countries, in most of our trading partners.
We are not alone in liberalising - and we are not alone in having some people in our country who are nervous about it.
In our region, liberalisation has in fact been the rule, not the exception - Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore all since 1988 have registered major reductions in applied tariffs. Korea, for example has gone from an average tariff rate of about 50%, to about 5% in 1997.
Finally, trade liberalisation is good for consumers.
It means cheaper, more varied goods. Economic surveys have shown that over the past 10 years, trade liberalisation has increased the average income of Australian families by $1000 a year, each.
And it should never be forgotten that a tariff is a tax: importers don't pay it, as much as we would like to think they do.
Ordinary Australians pay for tariffs through higher prices for both imported and locally produced goods. Moreover, tariffs are a very regressive tax because lower income earners face a proportionately higher burden. I do not pretend that world trade plays on a level field.
I do not pretend that every person in every sector will benefit from every piece of trade liberalisation.
But the bottom line is that we have no option, and anybody who pretends otherwise is pursuing a dumb agenda.
