Thursday, 2 May 2019

China and India trade strategies

Ms WOOLDRIDGE (Eastern Metropolitan) (18:06): My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Jobs, Innovation and Trade, and the action that I seek is that he review and revise the targets set in Victoria’s trade strategies for China and India. Victoria’s trade with India and China is absolutely key to economic growth for the state for so many businesses and individuals across Victoria. The Premier has travelled to both China and India, demonstrating a commitment to those relationships. What is very clear is the lack of meaningful targets in the trade strategies to genuinely drive performance throughout the government and beyond to enhance our trade and investment ties with these two countries.

The government’s China strategy was released in 2016 and the India strategy in 2018. It does not have meaningful targets for developing our relationships. The 2018 progress report on Victoria’s China strategy shows that after just two years the 10-year target for Chinese investment in Victoria has already been exceeded, as has the target for postgraduate Chinese students. Other 10-year targets have nearly been met. Both the India and China strategies set out to grow the number of international students from those countries by 25 per cent over the next 10 years, as a specific example. With the Premier’s recent visit to China, the government sought to brag that they had already achieved the 10-year target number for Chinese postgrad students in just two years. If anything, I think this was not something to brag about but rather a reflection of the failure of those strategies to set any kind of legitimate target to drive this performance over the 10 years ahead.

Looking specifically once again at international student enrolments, Chinese postgrad enrolments over the last 10 years have grown by 345 per cent, while Indian postgrad enrolments have grown by 209 per cent. The strategy sets a pretty low bar when the government expects growth over the next 10 years to be just 25 per cent in each of these strategies. These are redundant targets. The annualised growth rate of Indian postgrad student numbers is 15.8 per cent since 2002, and for Chinese students it is 16.1 per cent. Given that the Chinese target was achieved in just two years and it seems likely the Indian target will be achieved in a similar period, I seek that the minister review and revise not just the international student targets I have talked about but all the targets in the strategies so that they might actually serve to drive government policy and drive jobs and investment between India and Victoria and China and Victoria, rather than just declaring victory after achieving the low-ball targets these strategies have set.