Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Firstly, on the bilateral issue, like Canada, we have an export promotion arm of government whose job is--on a fee-for-service basis, I might say--to assist companies looking for markets overseas. It's very much the same system, I think, as you have in Canada. They can be contacted by a company and can arrange visiting company representatives to have a program in another country. We have tended to focus those missions in places where it's difficult to do business as a foreigner, in countries where English is not spoken. Obviously in a place like Canada, where doing business is very much like in Australia, you don't need much government assistance. But wherever you do get government assistance, you're going to pay for it. That's the basis of our trade promotion effort.
You asked about railroads and ports. I'm not entirely sure what the question is, but obviously the government is involved in building railroads and ports, sometimes on a purely governmental basis and sometimes in what in Australia we call a 3P--private-public partnership. There's a Canadian word for it; I think it's P3. You've been experimenting with that...well, not experimenting, because you have a very successful enterprise in Vancouver now with the Sea-to-Sky Highway, which is done with an Australian company. The 417 Highway around Toronto was also done with an Australian company. I don't think the position is much different between Australia and Canada on rail or roads, and God knows we need to work harder on ports, which has also been a hard sector to reform. We are about halfway down that track.
You were talking about sectors in distress. As I mentioned, we have had sectors in distress, and very often when sectors are in distress, they ask for protection. For a long time in Australia we gave protection to sectors in distress, and we found by the mid-1970s that the result of that policy--and I think my New Zealand colleague spoke very eloquently about this--was a gradual decline down the economic ladder. The worst thing about this is that it's very gradual. We found we were just gradually sinking down on the list of OECD countries in terms of per capita income, and we realized it was a dead end--in Australia's case. I'm not making any suggestion about Canada, but in Australia's case we realized it was a dead end. As my colleague has mentioned, the process of reform has reversed that trend, and we have now, for the last 15 or so years, been climbing up the list of countries in terms of income per head, and that is clearly directly related to the economic reforms we have undertaken.
Finally, you asked about transition for the olive oil sector. I'll have to get you statistics on that; I'm afraid I don't know offhand. But we have had a number of areas.... Motor vehicles is one where it was very highly protected, a sector that fought quite strongly against being opened up. It was opened up and still is in the process of being opened up, and the result has been that we now have a dynamic and very successful export of motor vehicles throughout the Middle East. Ten years ago, I would have been the first to say that this would be impossible, but in fact, one of the results of bringing international competitiveness to bear in that sector was to open it up and send it outwards.
People in Canada have often talked to me about the success of your own wine industry, something that I appreciate very much as a great buyer and enthusiastic promoter of Canadian wines myself. I know that the NAFTA effect, I'm told here, had the effect of greatly stimulating your own wine sector and sending it into new markets very admirably. I can tell you in my household there's one of those markets too.