Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I can't commence a discussion on free trade today without mentioning the late, great Bert Kelly, a former member for Wakefield, who fought for free trade back in the days when it wasn't fashionable. I'm talking about the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a member of this place, and then, post his parliamentary career, with a column in the Financial Review known as 'Modest Member', which was required reading in my household. His son Tony has moved to Mount Barker, in Western Australia, and his family are great supporters and great friends of mine. So that's just a quick shout-out to Bert Kelly, who understood the importance of free trade, and the free flow of goods and services and capital as the most efficient form of return on that capital.

Australia has been a massive beneficiary, and I'll give a shout-out to the Hawke-Keating governments, who led on free trade and dismantling the tariff arrangements that this country had and that held us back for so many years, through to the most recent coalition government, who inked 10 of our 16 free trade agreements. Thirteen of the 16 free trade agreements have been implemented under coalition governments. I'm very proud of that record and look forward to, in the future, the coalition being part of the constructive discussions around many more free trade agreements—although there's not a lot of room left. Under the coalition government from 2013 to 2022, we lifted the amount of trade covered by free trade agreements from 27 per cent in 2013 to over 70 per cent in 2022. Of course, if you include the UK and India free trade agreements, that takes that number to over 80 per cent.

For those watching today who might wonder what an ISDS is, I have, for their convenience, a definition provided by the Parliamentary Library. Investor state dispute settlement is a mechanism included in some free trade agreements and investment agreements. ISDS provides foreign investors, including Australian investors investing overseas, with recourse to an independent tribunal if they believe their investments have been unfairly treated by the government of the host country. The aim of ISDS provisions is to protect foreign investors and thereby encourage increased investment flows between the signatory countries.

Why is this important? Some of the significant businesses across my home state of Western Australia, which is pretty representative of Australia both in the ag sector and in the mining sector, see diversification and investment overseas as a critical part of their business plans and the security of their businesses, going forward.

For example, Co-operative Bulk Handling, the largest grain handler in the country—handling a 26-million-tonne record crop this year—has significant investments in flour mills and maltsters in both Indonesia and Vietnam. These are strategic investments. They are very important not only to that particular business but to the Western Australian farmers who supply grain to those businesses and own it via the cooperative structure. The ISDS provisions provide security on those investments in terms of governments changing the rules midstream. That is why we include ISDS provisions in our free trade agreements.

The mining industry, which are currently paying the bulk of the bills in this country at the moment, once again, see divestment and investment in overseas mining projects as a key part of their business plan. Of course, investing in overseas countries in high-capital-intensive businesses like mining can be very risky when governments change the rules midstream, so that is why ISDS provisions are critically important for not only the free flow of trade but also the free flow of investments, and not only for countries investing in Australia but for Australian companies investing overseas.

As has been pointed out previously in the debate, there has been one example of a case being brought against the Australian government. That was the Philip Morris case. Yes, on a technicality it was jurisdictional, but I will note that that company has not tried, since that case was thrown out on a jurisdictional basis, to bring a case through the ISDS mechanisms.

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