AustralianPolitics.com

The Minister for Trade, Craig Emerson, has delivered a speech on trade in which he reasserted the Labor Party’s commitment to free trade, open markets and competition.

Minister for Trade, Craig Emerson

Addressing the Lowy Institute, Emerson said the Labor Party’s guiding philosophy of economic reform “has been a commitment to markets and competition”. He said the “presumption must be that competition is good, more competition is better and markets are better than governments in allocating scare resources”.

Praising the unilateral decisions of the Hawke and Keating governments to reduce tariffs without this being conditional on other countries doing the same, Emerson said he wanted to “dispense with the bargaining chip approach to the remaining Australian tariffs”.

Emerson also embraced the principle of non-discrimination in negotiations with trading partners and the maintenance of “a clear separation between trade policy and foreign policy”.

The minister said he would be conducting a review of trade policy which would be released around the end of March next year.

• Listen to the introduction to Emerson’s speech at the Lowy Institute:

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

• Listen to Emerson’s speech:

  Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is the text of the speech to the Lowy Institute by the Minister for Trade, Craig Emerson.

As the Lowy Institute points out in its selection of the topic of my address today, the global economy is experiencing a period of unusual uncertainty, with debt crises in Europe, further quantitative easing in the United States and overheating in China. In the aftermath of the deepest global recession since the Great Depression, global imbalances are especially large. A huge excess of spending over saving in the United States and Europe is mirrored by a big excess of savings over spending in China and other surplus countries. [Read more...]