Nick Xenophon (SA, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Hansard source

I commend Senator Hanson-Young for moving this motion. This is an important debate because it seems that, with the election of Donald Trump as President-elect of the United States, the TPP will not be proceeded with by the US, and that was the fulcrum for this trade deal. I think we need to reflect, both in terms of trade deals generally, their importance and the problems we have had with them, and also to reflect on Donald Trump's role in respect of the TPP.

I want to pay tribute to Dr Patricia Ranald, a research associate at the University of Sydney and the Coordinator of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, AFTINET. She makes a point that Donald Trump did not kill the TPP. His opposition was only the final blow which came at the end of more than six years of criticism of the TPP in the US, Australia and other TPP countries by a whole range of community groups.

I think we need to look at the context of the TPP. It was not just about trade issues. It was about sovereignty. It was about the dispute resolution clauses that do take away our sovereignty and, as Senator McAllister made reference to, the Hong Kong case about plain packaging. There was a very worthy health measure moved by this parliament, and yet a multinational tobacco company found this little clause in a trade agreement with Hong Kong to have a case in Hong Kong which was eventually dropped, and that was the end of it. In recent Senate estimates, I asked a very simple question: how much money has the Australian government spent on defending that case? I have been told it is cabinet-in-confidence. Respectfully, that is nonsense and, if I have to end up in the AAT to fight that case, I am very confident of success. It cannot be cabinet-in-confidence to find out how many taxpayers' dollars were spent in fighting a legal case.

But that goes to the whole issue of secrecy of these deals and the way that they have been negotiated, and the TPP is no exception. One of the problems we have with our trade deals is that there has been enormous secrecy. As Dr Patricia Ranald says, there are precedents for ending secrecy in trade negotiations. The EU has determined that the full text of trade agreements should be made public before the decision to sign them instead of the parliament here been effectively a rubber-stamp or going through a very restricted process. You also have a position where the United States Congress is much more open in its process with the TPP and all trade agreements.

I want to talk more broadly about trade agreements. I know that Paul Kelly from The Australian has called me 'the most dangerous protectionist politician that this parliament has seen for a generation'. I think he secretly likes me because I think that actually helped me amongst my supporters. But he is wrong; I am not a protectionist. I just want to make sure that we have fair trade.

No less than the Productivity Commission has revealed predictions of growth in jobs from free trade agreements have rarely been delivered because the economic models employed exaggerate the benefits, ignore many of the costs and assume away unemployment effects.

The Australian National University's study of the outcomes of the US-Australia free trade agreement after 10 years showed the preferential agreement diverted trade away from other countries. Australia and the United States have reduced their trade with the rest of the world by US$53 billion or AU$71 billion and are worse off than they would have been without the agreement. That study concludes that:

Deals that are struck in haste for primarily political reasons carry risk of substantial economic damage.

We have seen with the FTAs with Japan, South Korea and China the claim that they will lead to tens of thousands of jobs. The government's own economic modelling, by the Canberra based Centre for International Economics, estimates that by 2035 these three FTAs will have produced a total of only 5,400 additional jobs. That is less than 300 jobs a year. Those are not my figures but the figures of the government's own modelling.

It seems that with the crisis in manufacturing in this country we have not negotiated these agreements well. I am not against the expansion of trade or negotiating free trade agreements. Trade is the lifeblood of our economy. But we have been lousy negotiators, and that is why we should move away from the TPP.