Mitchell Mark: Border Processing (Trade Single Window and Duties) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Mark: Border Processing (Trade Single Window and Duties) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 27 August 2013. Volume:693;Page:13116. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): It is a pleasure to take a call on the first reading of the Border Processing (Trade Single Window and Duties) Bill. I would like to acknowledge my colleague John Hayes who is the chair of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee which will be receiving the bill. I am sure that the committee will be very happy to get this bill.If we accept the fact that we are an export-based nation—and we are—and that 70 percent of our productivity is driven by the private sector then this is actually a very very good and important bill. One thing that we do face as a small nation down the bottom of the world competing with the rest of the world is our supply chain the fact that we are further away and therefore we do incur more costs and therefore we have to be more efficient. I would just like to acknowledge our exporters and our private sector because they spend a fair bit of time and invest a fair bit of their own capital in making sure that we are competitive and that we do have an efficient supply chain. The Government should be doing its bit in supporting them and this bill goes a long way to doing that.From my own experience in the logistics industry there has been a lot of investment gone into very very sophisticated programmes in partnership with companies like Microsoft focusing very heavily on in-transit visibility. Of course this bill has also got a flavour of that in terms of exporters and importers being able to have visibility on where their freight and where their containers are.I would just like to focus in on the registering of users of the Joint Border Management System because really this is where the rubber hits the road for a lot of our companies in terms of being able to streamline the process. Having had to deal with multiple agencies they are now able to interface and deal with one agency. The Customs and Excise Act 1996 requires that all goods imported or exported must be entered into the customs computer system by individuals—being importers exporters or their agents—who are registered users of the system. The trade single window will provide for a wider range of border requirements. For example registered users will be able to provide and receive information on the movement of their goods streamlining the supply chains. That sort of comes back to what I was saying earlier about this in-transit visibility and actually how critically important that is. The bill amends several aspects of the Customs and Excise Act to ensure that there is an appropriate registration mechanism for access to and use of the Joint Border Management System.The other thing that is actually really important about this bill is that there is a focus of course on making sure that our borders remain secure. We are very fortunate in many respects that we are an island nation. I have lived in countries where they have multiple shared borders of course and border security and biosecurity are always very very big issues there and costly in terms of trying to manage those. We are fortunate as an island nation that we are able to focus very carefully on how we do that ourselves.The areas covered by the amendments include allowing companies to be registered users instead of individuals only specific grounds on which the Chief Executive of the Customs Service can refuse an application are included and allowing the Chief Executive of the Customs Service to issue unique user identifiers for the Joint Border Management System that can be used by both customs and the Ministry for Primary Industries for border-related purposes. Finally I would just like to say again that this is a very very good bill. I am sure that Mr Hayes and the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee are looking forward to receiving this bill and I commend it to the House.