Zoe McKenzie MP
Shadow Cabinet Secretary
Shadow Assistant Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations
Member for Flinders
Speech | German-Australian Chamber of Industry and Commerce Reception
German Residence, Canberra
Tuesday, 8 September 2026
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Sehr geehrter Herr Kraemer,
Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Goennemann,
Sehr geehrter Herr Walde,
Ambassador-designate Meredith,
Liebe Tania,
Meine sehr verehrten Damen und Herren, liebe Freundinnen und Freunde Deutschlands –
Vielen Dank für die herzliche Einladung. Es ist mir eine große Freude, heute Abend hier bei Ihnen zu sein.
I will switch to English now, not because my German has deserted me, but because a good half of this room is Australian, and they would quite like to know what I have just agreed to.
Can I thank the Embassy for opening the Residence to us, and AHK Australien for bringing this delegation to Canberra.
Tonight is the easy part!
Tomorrow you have to talk to politicians before lunch.
I should declare an interest.
I have spent a fair part of my working life on trade agreements, formerly as chief of staff to Australian trade minister, Andrew Robb, where we shepherded Australia’s agreements with Japan, South Korea and China, TPP, upgraded Singapore, and got stuck into RCEP, Indonesia, Hong Kong, India, and the EU.
I now serve as Deputy Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, which means that when the Australia–EU Free Trade Agreement comes to this Parliament, it comes to my committee.
So you will forgive me for raising it here.
On 24 March, after almost eight years of formal negotiations, and many many years of informal and preliminary negotiations before it, Australia and the European Union concluded negotiations on an FTA.
The intention is that: 98% per cent of the current value of Australia’s goods exports will eventually enter the EU duty free.
The Agreement will open a market of 450 million consumers to our exporters, and it opens Australia more fully to yours.
But let us be honest about the calendar, because businesses plan on calendars rather than communiqués.
The text still has to be scrubbed and translated.
Signature is expected late this year or early next.
The Australian parliament still needs to provide its consent, a process that unfortunately, is not yet guaranteed to end in success.
Which means it is essential that we focus on how Germany and Australia make each other stronger together, than apart.
Germany is by some distance our largest trading partner within the European Union, yet still only around our thirteenth largest in the world, with roughly $29 billion of two-way trade.
For the third largest economy on earth and the twelfth, that is not a tragedy, but it is an underachievement.
The composition tells you why it should be bigger: vehicles, machinery, pharmaceuticals, electrical and medical equipment.
Which is to say, very nearly the guest list here tonight.
For those goods, tariffs were never really the obstacle.
Australia’s applied tariffs are already low.
The value in this agreement for German firms is in the mechanical chapters: work on standards and conformity assessment, so that what is certified in Bavaria is not re-certified in Broadmeadows; a services and investment chapter with real disciplines; access to government procurement, which in this country is where the rail, the water, the grid and the hospitals actually are; and professional mobility arrangements that let you post an engineer here for four years without an annual immigration adventure.
And then there is the part I find genuinely novel and ambitious: critical minerals, hydrogen, green goods from a trusted manufacturing market and the many cooperation frameworks that sit alongside the tariff schedules.
Australia has the resources, the land and the sunlight.
Germany has the process engineering, the machine tools and the Mittelstand that knows how to build the second factory as well as the first.
Fortescue, Siemens Energy, ENERCON, CO2CRC, Fraunhofer with RMIT, Quantum Brilliance in Canberra – none of that is a trade statistic yet. It is what the statistics look like five years before they appear.
A word from the Opposition benches, since that is where I sit:
These negotiations were formally launched in 2018 under a Coalition Government. But a mountain of work preceded it, by Andrew Robb as Trade Minister, Julie Bishop as Foreign Minister, and my friend Mathias Cormann, as unofficial Minister for Germany.
They were concluded in 2026 under a Labor Government.
Neither side gets to claim this alone: Trade policy in Australia only works when it can survive a change of government.
I will leave you with one piece of advice, and then I will let you get back to the wine.
Do not wait for entry into force.
The firms that did best out of the Japanese, Korean and Chinese agreements were the ones already in the market on day 1.
The contracts that get signed on entry into force are the conversations that start in rooms like this one.
Which is the whole point of tonight, and I congratulate you on bringing such an interesting and impactful room together tonight.
Vielen Dank – und einen schönen Abend!
[Thank you – and have a wonderful evening!]
