Tasmania’s trade strategy scores export opportunities

Jeremy Rockliff,Minister for Trade

The inaugural Tasmanian Trade Scorecard shows our goods exports managed to maintain 1.2 per cent growth across the year despite an extremely turbulent time in domestic and international markets with disruptions due to COVID-19.

The Trade Scorecard is a check of progress against the goals of the Tasmanian Trade Strategy 2019-2025, and shows that as we continue to recover and rebuild from the pandemic we remain well placed to re-engage with key markets.

The Scorecard also found that:

  • The state’s goods exports were led by the mining and agribusiness sectors, seeing increases of $667 million and $222 million over the year respectively, taking the total to $3.7 billion;
  • More than 1,950 businesses accessed a Tasmanian Government trade-related service across the year and 91 per cent were satisfied with the service they received;
  • Across the financial year more than 1,600 Tasmanian businesses were promoted directly to, or within, their target export markets; and
  • More than 300 new contracts or business opportunities collectively worth more than $150 million were achieved with the assistance of our trade expansion activities.

We are committed to helping our producers, exporters and manufacturers to adjust to the new global business climate and have announced in the 2020-21 State Budget an additional $2.65 million for trade development and the implementation of the Interim Trade Action Plan.

This investment comes as part of our plan to rebuild a stronger Tasmania by boosting returns to Tasmanian businesses over the long term and get us back on track towards our target of growing the value of our exports to $15 billion a year by 2050.

/Public Release. View in full here.