bargaining chips in negotiations for future trade deals. As Trade Minister, I want to reconnect with the Hawke-Keating governments' first guiding principle in economic reform that competition is good, and dispense with the bargaining chip approach to the remaining Australian tariffs. Australia should make its offers, our trading partners should make theirs, and where appropriate we should encourage them to go further. But if the final deal is not in Australia's national interest we should not accept it. Some may hold the view that this sort of approach is naive; that our regional trading partners are all hiding behind high tariff walls, ready to reap the benefits of our liberalisation without offering anything themselves. But that is not the reality. Among Australia's key trading partners in the APEC region, which account for 44 per cent of global trade and 70 per cent of Australia's exports, average applied tariffs have been lowered over the last quarter of a century from more than 25 per cent to around 5 per cent. APEC has helped establish the confidence necessary for economies to undertake unilateral trade policy reforms -- a confidence in the knowledge that tariff reductions made sense from a domestic reform perspective and that regional partners were doing the same. Nevertheless, it is true that substantial trade barriers remain in place for agriculture in a number of APEC economies and much work remains to be done in reducing behind-the-border restrictions on services exports. But overall, good trade liberalising progress has been made