Australia's trade deal with China creates opportunities for our service industries Chinese President Xi Jinping is welcomed to Parliament House in Canberra by Prime Minister Tony Abbott. The trade deal with China signed today should be discussed around kitchen tables throughout Australia, by families wondering where their children will find jobs. That job might be in urban planning, environmental engineering, project management, teaching, healing or simply finding comfortable beds for the 200 million Chinese expected to travel in 2020. Those jobs could come from supplying services - premium quality and expensive - to the growing Asian middle class wanting them. Services make up 80 per cent of our economy but just 15 per cent of our exports, so there is plenty of room to expand. Australia's triple crown in trade agreements - with China and previously with Japan and Korea - has made that middle class more accessible to Australian service providers. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott share a lovely chat of some sort. There will be rarefied talk about tariffs and massive investment codes in the wake of this agreement. But back at those kitchen table discussions, the talk should be about picking the best vocations whose prospects were boosted by the agreement. That's what was on the line when Prime Minister Tony Abbott and President Xi Jinping today put their signatures on the dotted line for a hard won trade deal. No one knows the potential jobs bonanza better and promotes it more enthusiastically than Trade Minister Andrew Robb, who negotiated the China deal. "People think of services as someone passing a cup of coffee when actually it is the ability to train other people in a process, where it's a manufacturing process, a tourism process," said Mr Robb today. Australian Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Robb. So a youngster who's good at trades might not actually work in that trade, but get a better job teaching others in Asia and setting up schools. "Whatever they do ... if they're doing environmental studies, China's got 20 per cent of the world's population and seven per cent of the world's water and a lot of it is polluted," said Mr Robb. There's so much expertise we've got in our country to deal with those practical, urgent issues if they are going to feed all their people and feed them properly and all the rest, and have sufficient water as they get more and more middle class. You can almost look across any discipline - legal, engineering, the design areas, the architectural areas, project management ... we are seen in Australia, we are seen across the region as having particular aptitude for project management in all sorts of areas. Xi Jinping and Tony Abbott. This breakthrough was necessary because just as our economy slipped off the sheep's back a generation ago, it is starting to fall from the iron ore and coal carrier today. The income from our resources exports is starting to recede for a variety of reasons and there is a pressing need for export industries and sectors to supplement that declining income over decades to come. There are still 900,000 Australians employed in manufacturing and they will gain from the China pact. But the emphasis from now on, particularly around those kitchen tables, will be on the opportunities in the service industries. Originally published as What our deal with China means for you