Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion by my colleague the member for Page, the coalition shadow minister for trade, and, indeed, to support the coalition's remarkable success in the trade portfolio over the last decade, in which I've been proud to play a small part. It is worth remembering where we stood in global trade terms when the last coalition government came to power in September 2013. On election night, Prime Minister Tony Abbott declared Australia 'open for business', and he backed it up with the most aggressive and ambitious trade agenda of any Australian government. The Prime Minister set the mighty task of completing three free trade agreements within a year: the free trade agreement with South Korea, a free trade agreement with Japan and a free trade agreement with China. He gave that mandate—and that torturous time line, I might say—to my friend and then-boss the Hon. Andrew Robb AO, former member for Goldstein. I had the privilege of being Andrew's chief of staff and serving with him in the trade portfolio throughout his tenure.

Those first three trade agreements were concluded within 14 months, but the first agreement of the trifecta, with Korea, was completed quite quickly. Why? Because it had sat largely completed and yet unsigned, because an election was coming and the Australian Labor Party was not allowed by its union masters to ink the deal, despite five years of negotiating effort, almost entirely conducted under the former Labor government, going to waste. That delay had a real impact on Australia's exporters, who were held back from enjoying an eventual reduction of tariffs, of up to 300 per cent, on our Australian agricultural exports such as beef, wheat, sugar, dairy, wine, horticulture and seafood; the elimination of tariffs on resources, energy and manufactured goods; and new opportunities and avenues for Australian education services, but also telecommunications and a range of other professional services including financial, accounting and legal services.

Australia's union movement has always had a bizarre allergy to investor-state dispute agreements, and as we have seen so well here, as in other domains, the union movement is the tail that continues to wag the ALP dog. ISDS clauses provide a level of certainty and confidence for Australian businesses investing overseas. Equally, Australia is a highly attractive place for foreign investment, underpinned by our robust legal system and general protections for investors, under both contractual and consumer laws. But we understand that not all governments and not all countries and, indeed, not all subnational governments act as we do, nor do we always share the same legal systems and practices, nor do we necessarily share the same political and institutional cultures. ISDS clauses provide safeguards for investors against arbitrary government actions such as appropriating of property or property rights, discrimination and the denial of justice.

Australia has negotiated ISDS clauses for over 30 years, firstly in investment treaties and more recently in free trade agreements. There are ISDS provisions in our FTAs with China, South Korea, Chile, Singapore, Thailand, ASEAN, Peru, Hong Kong and Indonesia and, indeed, in the CPTPP. Australia has ISDS provisions in 15 investment treaties: with Argentina, China, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Hungary, Laos, Lithuania, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Sri Lanka, Turkiye and Uruguay. There have been barely a dozen instances where Australian companies have used ISDS clauses to bring a claim against other countries to protect Australian investments there. Importantly, an ISDS clause has been used against Australia on only one occasion: the tobacco plain-packaging case, which Australia won, perhaps, on a jurisdictional point but won nevertheless.

So why does Labor hate ISDS clauses? Because the unions tell them so. Until 2011, there had been a bipartisan approach on ISDS in this country, to provide certainty to Australian businesses investing overseas, but, strangely, in Gillard's trade policy statement of 2011, the ALP declared it would no longer include such clauses in our investment agreements. The ACTU asserts that ISDS provides an avenue for foreign corporations to threaten and lodge claims for actual or potential harm resulting from changes in policy and regulation in the country in which they are investing. This reminds me of the ACTU's vast nationwide scare campaign against the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement in late 2015 on the basis it would cause the loss of thousands of Australian jobs in favour of imported Chinese labour. The sky didn't fall in then, nor has it fallen in as a result of any ISDS clause.

It is no surprise the coalition wears the crown for achievements in trade. Under coalition steerage, the share of trade covered by FTAs shot up from 25 per cent at the start of the last coalition government to over 70 per cent by the time the coalition lost government—almost 80 per cent if you include India and the UK.

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