E&OE............
John Howard is set to arrive in Washington tomorrow and is expected
to confront President Clinton on the lamb issue next week. The Prime
Minister told Matt Peacock in Tokyo that Washington is guilty of double
standards.
PRIME MINISTER:
The United States is constantly encouraging people and exhorting people
to support open trade. They condemn others who don't practise open
trade but when it suits their own convenience, because they are the
strongest country in the world, they just slam on these punitive tariffs.
Now, in the end we can but complain and help our own. We'll take them
to the World Trade Organisation. We'll use all the rules that are
available and we'll invoke all the rules against them, which we have
a perfect right to do, and we'll help our own as best we can. And
I say to the lamb producers, we'll try and help you because you have
been very unfairly treated.
PEACOCK:
At the end of the day the free trade stuff is rhetoric, at the end
of the day might is right.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, on this particular issue common-sense has not prevailed, that
doesn't mean to say you don't keep trying because we are better off
now than we would have been if some of the markets that we have won
over the past few years had not been prized open. And even though
we've suffered a severe setback on this issue, and we have every right
to complain, on other fronts, for example, we are supplying something
like 30 per cent of the beef market here in Japan. Now, that's something
we weren't doing a few years ago and we wouldn't have won that if
we hadn't have campaigned for more liberal trade. So, because we've
had a set back it doesn't mean to say we don't keep trying.
PEACOCK:
Is this compensation package that you're offering the lamb industry
a one-off or would you be prepared to offer it to any other efficient
Australian industry?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm not giving any open-ended, on-the-run commitments. That's silly.
I'm dealing with a quite specific situation where this industry won
a market. It's won it without any government help. We're not here
talking about helping a failing, inefficient Australian industry.
We're talking about helping an industry that's played by the rules
of open, vigorous trade, won a market and then been unfairly clobbered.
Now, according to all the understandings of Australian fair play those
people are entitled to a bit of help and that's what we're going to
do.
[ends]