Page 3330 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 24 November 1992
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In one sense, Madam Speaker, that is very bad news for Australia, because what it means is that some of the industries in some Second and Third World countries, which in the past were no competition at all for Australian industry, are now very much competitive with our industries and are becoming more so. Countries which could not compete technologically with Australia are now doing so, very much to Australia's detriment. The essential message of a program of micro-economic reform is that we have to adapt to these changes or we will not merely welcome these new economies as fellows in the ranks of First World nations but rather exchange places with them.
A great deal of evidence has been put forward to support the enormous concern with which many face the future and the need for this sort of reform. It behoves us to mention a few examples. It takes five hours to unload a ship in Singapore or Hong Kong. It takes at least five days in Australia to do the same thing. As a trading nation, our ranking has slipped in terms of share of exports - - -
Mr Connolly: Our port in the ACT is the most efficient in the country; I can assure you of that. It falls within my transport portfolio, and it is excellent. You go down and talk to Captain Jolly on the lake, mate.
MR HUMPHRIES: I will go down to the Acton jetty and check that out. I have not seen any ships unloading there lately, Mr Connolly. Madam Speaker, as a trading nation our ranking dropped from thirteenth in the world in 1961 to nineteenth in the world in 1989. Compare our performance with that of a country such as South Korea, which had a world trade export ranking of ninety-ninth back in 1961 and today is thirteenth. It is not a very pretty picture.
In the Asia-Pacific region real GDP growth from 1980 to 1990 averaged 8.6 per cent every year. That is an average across the whole region. Economies of places such as Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan on average are two-and-a-quarter times larger than they were just 10 years ago.
Mr Lamont: And they are your models for industrial relations, are they?
MR HUMPHRIES: Our GDP over the same period of time averaged just three-and-a-half per cent growth and we are now only 40 per cent larger than we were back then, and we have 16 per cent more people.
I heard an interjection that this is a model we want to use in this country. Having recently visited some of those countries, I have to say no, I do not particularly want to see Australia go down those paths; but I do want to see Australia do one thing, and that is accept that we can do many things we do in this country far more efficiently than we do at the present time. If we do not accept the need to do that and do not embrace the need for change as an imperative, as an absolute essential, a sine qua non, for proceeding into the next century, then we will not survive comparisons with countries such as Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, because we will be considered to be of a lower rank than those countries, which will have had standards of living higher than ours and levels of production and efficiency higher than ours for some time by the time we reach that stage. Indeed, Madam Speaker, I do not need to say that countries such as Japan, quite arguably, are already well past us.
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