Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I confess that I don't have at my fingertips the exact figures on who has benefited most from free trade, but I'm happy to provide them. I'll dig out statistics and send them to you. My very strong impression is that everybody in Australia, with very few exceptions, has benefited from the reforms in free trade.
I know we always talk about the rising tide lifting all ships, and I think that has very much been the case in Australia. The average income has gone up. Income levels at the top have gone up dramatically, but incomes at the bottom have gone up considerably too. I recall seeing in the press recently some figures to support that.
And that's what you'd expect too, I must say. If you move people out of uneconomic areas into competitive and economic areas, then they're going to do better. They may not be doing better in the same sector, but they will move to areas that are doing better because they're economic areas.
I think that has been the benefit of free trade to us. It's not just that you get better access internationally, but that the focus of economic production within your own country goes to the more efficient sectors, and the more efficient sectors pay better. I recall seeing several studies about people who moved out of the dairy industry, for example. After a short period—and it may be a short period of two or three years—they moved to another sector and are doing better, which is what you'd expect because they're in a more efficient sector.
So we would have no doubts about the benefits, right throughout the economy, of efficiency and globalization and better allocation of resources. This is just economics 101.
You asked secondly about strategy to diversify exports. Of course, like Canada, we are a free market economy, so I'm a bit reluctant to talk about government strategies in one sense. But in the other sense, I suppose it's true to say that if you allow market forces to operate, your industry and your exports will diversify according to the market. In Canada every now and then, bless you, you drink the odd bottle of Australian wine, and good for you. This is itself a function of the diversification of the Australian economy. It has only been a few years since we've been exporting wine, and the reason we're exporting wine is that people have moved from other sectors that were less efficient and into wine production, which has been more efficient.
We used to have a very extensive citrus industry a few years ago, but it was nowhere near as efficient as the Brazilian citrus industry, so it failed and the citrus producers moved into other areas. One of the areas they moved into was olive oil production, and we now have a very dynamic, efficient, and beneficial olive oil industry.
So the diversification of Australian exports has really come as a result of free trade and a result of globalization, because they have been obliged to move into areas that are dynamic and naturally efficient.