Senate debates

Tuesday, 7 February 2017

Committees

Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee; Report

7:10 pm

Photo of Sarah Hanson-YoungSarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the report of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee in relation to the TPP. Let me firstly state the obvious: that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead. It is dead in the water, and it is time this government accepted that it was a bad deal from the beginning, and it should not in any way try to be revived. And let me say that Australia is a trading nation. But when you look at our trade deficit, you have to wonder what on earth this government and successive governments have been doing to our trade arrangements for the last decade. In 2016—last year—our trade deficit hit $36 billion. So, we are not getting a very good deal at the moment from our negotiators on the government benches in relation to our trade deals—$36 billion in deficit. This is the legacy that is currently being carried by the government.

And the TPP was only going to add more pain to that. We hear all about the fact that it was meant to create jobs. Well, that is a load of absolute garbage, because we know that no independent assessment has been conducted by the government to back up those claims. In fact, what we have seen instead is analysis that has been conducted by others showing that we would not even get to 0.7 per cent of growth over the next 13 to 15 years. Now, surely that is a rounding error at best. It was going to be bad for Australian jobs and bad for Australian consumers, and it was going to push up the cost of cancer medicine in this country, because who negotiated this trade deal, in secret, behind closed doors? It was the big multinational corporations, stitching this deal up for themselves and wanting it delivered for them as well.

We know that this deal was designed to meet the needs and desires of the big corporations. It had nothing to do with creating a job-rich economy back here in Australia. It had nothing to do with putting the community at the centre. And I must say, it is quite welcoming to hear from the Labor Party that they are willing to talk about opening up and looking at how we reform the treaty-signing process and how we go about signing trade deals, because it is high time we stripped away the secrecy, high time we started putting people and communities back at the centre.

We hear our trade ministers and our Prime Minister from time to time go on and on about how these trade deals are wonderful; they are going to make Australia rich, boost job growth. They never have the facts to back up those statements. In fact, it is the exact opposite: a trade deficit of $36 billion. And the TPP was going to deliver a rounding error at best, over the next 13 to 15 years.

One of the most insidious parts of this deal was those ISDS clauses—those clauses that were going to allow big multinational companies to sue governments, here in Australia or elsewhere, if a government dared to act in a way that might impact on their profits. We have seen examples of this before: big tobacco coming in and saying, 'How dare the Australian government start saying that they want to do something about cutting down the amount of cigarettes that Australians smoke because they are worried about the health impacts on the community.' How much public money was spent fighting that in the courts because big tobacco were so upset that their profits were going to be hurt by those regulations? What would happen if we wanted to introduce proper, genuine food labelling in this country—whether it was to say how much sugar, how much fat or how healthy or not a product was? What would happen if we wanted to put a genuine made-in-Australia stamp on the front of packets of food? They could then be compared to those foreign products pretending to be made in Australia—when we know, pretty much, that the produce comes from elsewhere. What would those big multinational food corporations say then? 'Oh no, the Australian government and the Australian parliament cannot introduce laws for proper labelling of food, because that might impact on our profits.' So they drag the Australian government through years and years of a court process, sucking up hundreds of millions of dollars of Australian taxpayers' money to fight that out in the courts, even when the parliament has perhaps acted on something that the Australian community wanted.

Those ISDS clauses are inherently and fundamentally undemocratic, and we had this government, the Abbott-Turnbull government, signing Australia up and begging Donald Trump to keep the TPP alive and on the table, despite the fact that it was not going to deliver growth for Australia, that job numbers were not going to go up and that we were going to be trading away our sovereignty, because we would be letting big corporations have the power to sue the government of Australia. Why on earth would the Prime Minister of Australia think that is the one topic to go and beg the new President of the US over? Heavens above, there are a lot of other things coming out of the Trump administration right now, and the one thing that Malcolm Turnbull is desperate to change his mind on is to revitalise and bring back to life the zombie of the TPP. Priorities are absolutely in the wrong place and the wrong order with this Prime Minister. There was no independent analysis. The government have not been able to back up their claims. In fact, every time there was analysis done they wanted to dismiss it. 'Alternative facts' are running riot through the government benches, trying to bring back to life the dead-in-the-water TPP.

There is still some suggestion from Malcolm Turnbull that we could unscramble the omelette and put the TPP back together in some other way without the United States. Anyone who has looked at this agreement knows you just cannot do that, because the deals are all done on the basis that what people would get and what other countries would get is inherently linked to what concessions the United States would give. It is ludicrous and delusional to think that you could just reinvent the TPP with the US removed.

So, back to the drawing board. Everything else now needs to be put back on the table. What kind of trade negotiations do we want to see from here on in? We should be seeing trade negotiations that are open, that are transparent to the public, that are backed up by fact, not 'alternative fact', and that have an independent analysis on what impact an agreement would really have on the Australian economy, on Australian jobs and on consumers. We should not be letting our government go into any negotiation meeting without saying, 'We will not agree to any inclusion of the ISDS clauses.' Any government worth their salt who brings in an ISDS clause and agrees to that— (Time expired)

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