" TAK TO '. Tii T
BY THE, PRj? LTI. . T. R EIT HO R. oGJ. N Z]: TZE
Ladies and gentlcmcn, On this occasion I am going to talk to you for little
under a quarter of an hour about some aspects of our trade problem.
I won't be able to say very much about any part of it, but I hope
I can give you a reasonably clear survey, and so I want to start
with this map of E-ope, which contains the area which we call the
Common Market. This comprises the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg,
France, 7, est Germany and Italy,
These six nations back in 1957, made a treaty, The Treaty
of Rome, and tha' was a treaty which was designed to set up an area
of economic cc-operation in Europe, The main features of this
were, that irstead of having six countries, each with its own tariff
barriers against the others, the Six should, over a reasonably
short period of time, have a common tariff against the rest of the
world and, internally, free trade, which means of course, that
goods from France could pass into Germany within a few years free
of duty. But both France and Germany for example, would have,
as against the rest of the world, a cormmon tariff barrier,
There are many other aspects of it. It is a tremendously
important agreement. It has very big political implications.
It is going to have, I think, considerable effect on working
conditions, on economic policy, on financial policy. But time
will not perinit me to go into those details, I ask you however,
to take it from me that this European Common Market is, in itself,
one of the great economic developments of this century, and it
has become of particular importance to us, because Great Britain
is now seeking to enter the Common Market and other Nations no
doubt will follow suit. This means that Great Britain is seeking
to become one of the nations now called The Six,
Now why does this concern us? -ell, the answer is
that the whole pattern of Australian trade for many years has been
based on Commonwealth preferential trade. In other words, we
get a number of our commodities like wheat, butter and dried fruits
and so on, into Great Britain free of duty, while similar goods
from other countries pay duty, That gives us a preference.
And in the came way British goods, chiefly manufactured goods,
passing into Australia, have come in under the British pref'erential
tarifff Now this mutual preferential system in the Commonwealth
has, I think been, from our point of view economically, the
outstanding thing of this century.
Now we have to consider how you reconcile the one
with the other. How does Great Britain become a meber of a
Free Trade area, and at the same time preserve the substance of,
for example, Australian trade with Great Britain' 9 You see the
great imnportance of it.
There is a little cou': ntry up here, Denmark, which is
not yet a member of The Six, but I should think certainly will be,
And Denmark produces a great deal of butter and dairy products
generally. Today there is a duty against them, but Australian
goods of the same kind go in free and also New Zealand goods
and it is very, very important for New Zealand go in free,
If Great Britain went into the Co. Anon Market
unconditionally just signed on the dotted line, and I don't
think for one moment she is going to do that the position would
be that our preferences would disappear, because she would have
to be inside the common tariff barrier herself. Our preferential
system would be converted into a free trade preference from
European countries, so that French wheat would go into England
free of duty, and our wheat would pay duty. You can see exactly
how tremendously important this is.
Niw we are in the closest negotiations with Great
Britain. We have put ourselves in close contact with the
countries of The Six, because we want her to be able to negotiate
terms and conditions for going into the European Common Market,
which will well how shall I put it? inflict the minimum of
harm on our trade, and, in particular, enable particular industries
in Australia which practically live on the British market, such
as dried fruits, to continue in existence, This we regard as a
great battle. We believe that you would want to have it
conducted on your behalf by people of great experience and of
some standing with the administering authorities in Great Britain,
and indeed with the leaders of these European countries.
Well the negotiations have only just begun. We have
done an immense amount of work in London, in Europe, and in
Australia and are continuing to do it. And you may take it that
we will regard it as our great responsibility to the export
industries of Australia to see that when the day comes that the
United Kingdom has concluded its negotiations, those negotiations
will have resulted in some special provisions for Coimnonwealth
trade which would be rather different froim the ones now existing
between the countries of The Six. I need not go into detail on
that matter, because you can see how tremendously difficult it is.
It is very complex. The negotiations will take a long time,
because there are scores and scores of individual items which
will have to be taken into account,
Recently, when Great Britain announced that she was
going into these negotiations, and that they would involve
agricultural products, it was something new from our point of
view. Comments were made in Parliament and elsewhere that we
should have anticipated this, and that we are starting off on the
business of building up our trade with the rest of the world too
late. Now it is very important that we should build up our
trade with the rest of the world. It is not likely that we
will come out of these discussions one hundred per cent as well
off as we are under the existing system, I think that would
be putting it a little high, optimistic as I am0 And therefore
it is of tremendous importance for us as a great trading nation,
to see that we are developing our trade all round the world, and
I am going to proceed to this other map in order to tell you
quite briefly how much we have done about that matter in the last
ten years, and in particular during the last five years, since
the Department of Trade was established for this very pu: rpose.
If you will look at tha. t map you will see that there
are certain countries marked, United Kingdom, Belgium, West
Germany, France, Italy, Tr~ n, India, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand,
3.
. the United States and Canada. These are the twelve countries
with whom we do the bulk of our overseas trade. Or to be more
accurate, these are the twelve countries which are our biggest
partners in trade, in and out. But in addition to that, we set
out some time ago, years ago, to develop our Trade Connissioner
Service so that we would encourage trade and not only with those
countries, but elsewhere. And on this map you will see marked
places like Stockholm and Bonn, London of course, and Paris and
Rome; courtries in Africa fromL Cairo through Nairobi, Salisbury
down to Johannesburg, across to Accra in Ghana; Beirut, Karachi,
Bombay, New Delhi, Calcutta, Colombo, Bangkok, up to Tokyo,
Hongkong, Manila, Kuala Lumpur in Malaya, Singapore, Djakarta
and of course New Zealand; and over here in Canada, Vancouver,
Ottawa and Montreal; and in the United States, San Francisco,
Chicago, New York, Washington; and in South America, comparatively
recently, Trinidad and Lima.
Now this is a very great establishment of Trade
Commissioners and as you probably know the work done by the Trade
Commissioner Service is in forwarding trade, in promoting trgde
missions, sometimes trad, ships, special surveys conducted by
organised groups of business men and this work is tremendously
important. I think that we can say confidently, that so far
from neglecting the business of building up our trade, wherever
we can get trade around the world, we have been remarkably active
in that field. '. NIe now have far more Trade Commissioner posts
than ever existed before in Australian history.
In order to encourage exports from Australia, in 1956
we established a special Insurance Corporation to insure people
in relation to connercial transactions in which there were certain
risks of a non-commuercial kind. This is a scheme which has been
adopted in Great Britain, and which operates in Canada and which
has gone remarkably well. It is a scheme which has been referred
to, approached by exporters, including manufacturing exporters,
so far that it has already insured transactions into 120 different
countries in the viorld. That is, I think you will agree, a
remarkable thing, and because we attach tremendous . importance to
developing an export of manufactured and processed goods, we
introduced only 18 months ago but before this Common Market
crisis developed a system of special tax concessions in relation
to export goods which I believe is very well received by the
vastly important manufacturing industry of Australia. It arose
in fact out of consultations that we had with eminent men in
that field. Now all that adds up to this. We are out for business.
Ic believe that we can do business more and more, and we will do
it of course, more and more if we have a stable Government with
experienced people to do the negotiations, with the good will
of the rest of the world, and with a high credit standing i the
rest of the world.
That is a very short summary. A very imperfect
summary of the most complex problem we have to deal with in the
course of the next twelve months. We will deal with it, with
your authority; we will put all our enthusiasm into it, because
we believe that in all these discussions we are battling for the
true interests of what we believe to be a wonderful country, and
above that the most promising country to be found in the Free
World.