July 17, 2014 11:32AM 

# Government Officials Praising Unilateral Trade Liberalization 

By [Simon Lester](https://www.cato.org/people/simon-lester) 

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It doesn’t happen often, so I like to highlight it when it does. [Here is](http://trademinister.gov.au/transcripts/Pages/2014/ar_tr_140717a.aspx) Australian trade minister Andrew Robb:

> We’ve seen over the last thirty years in Australia that tariffs are down on average 2.7 per cent across the economy. A lot of that was done unilaterally – we didn’t wait for the rest of the world and it’s one of the reasons that we’ve had uninterrupted growth for 23 years, because we are a very open economy. We’ve got to drive it further, we’ve got to be more competitive but so does the rest of the world.

##### Related Tags 

[Trade Policy](https://www.cato.org/trade-policy), [Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies](https://www.cato.org/herbert-stiefel-center-trade-policy-studies) 

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