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

I rise to distance the Australian Greens from the recommendations in this report. Just to be absolutely clear, an administrative error has meant that my name is on this report along with everybody else's. I do not support the recommendations outlined in this committee report, and the Australian Greens are on the record as having been consistently opposed to what we see as the very negative impacts and very few benefits of the TPP mark 1 and, now, the subsequent TPP mark 2.

This report recommends that the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement proceed. The view of the Australian Greens is that it should not. We believe that the economic benefits outlined have been grossly exaggerated and the costs downplayed. We believe the agreement represents an affront to our democratic sovereignty and should be rejected in the strongest possible terms. Of course, having this committee look at this and report is effectively a formality. The real test will be when the initiating legislation comes before this house. That is going to be the test of how people on all sides of politics view the TPP and vote in relation to it.

One of the gravest concerns that the Australian Greens have in relation to the TPP is the inclusion in this agreement of investor-state dispute settlement provisions, the ISDS clauses. We've heard quite a bit about these clauses in the past. We know that, in the United States, there has been an incredible debate about this. We also know that, in Europe, there has been a much bigger debate about the impact of ISDS clauses in trade negotiations, and I note that, in the EU negotiations that Australia has started to participate in, it has already been made very clear that, from the European perspective, ISDS provisions are not to be included. I think that, in itself, sends a warning sign: why on earth would Australia be signing up to something that includes these provisions?

Why are they so bad? These measures advance the interests of corporations over the interests of governments and the citizens to whom they are accountable. We may pass a law in this place that we had promised to pass, the passing of that law by this house having been pushed and argued by the public and our constituents. Yet, if that law were to impact on a company that wanted to invest in Australia in some ways through this trade agreement, that foreign entity would be able to sue the Australian government and, therefore, the Australian people. That is why I believe it is fundamentally undemocratic.

The ISDS provisions expand the legal rights of multinational corporations based on legal concepts not even recognised in national systems and offer advantages not available to domestic investors. Why on earth would we be handing, on a silver platter, to multinational corporations—who, let's remember, have to be begged to even pay their taxes in this country—provisions to sue the government, whether federal, state or local government, and therefore the Australian people, particularly provisions that are not even available to Australian companies here on domestic soil? These provisions are unfair, they are unrepresentative and they are unnecessary.

We don't need them in order to develop and agree to various trade negotiations. We know that because they have been ruled out of our negotiations, as I mentioned, in relation to the EU. The fact that they are unnecessary is upheld by the recent decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union. These decisions, made in 2017 and 2018, found that ISDS is fundamentally incompatible with national sovereignty. That is what the EU Court of Justice has said. As a result, the EU is not proposing any form of ISDS in its negotiations, including in the Australia-EU Free Trade Agreement negotiations currently underway.

The New Zealand government, as we know, has made it very clear throughout its negotiations that it does not support ISDS provisions as part of the TPP, and as a result it has negotiated to remove the ISDS provisions through four supplementary, legally binding side letters with Brunei, Malaysia, Peru and Vietnam. If it's good enough for New Zealand to do—to get out of being impacted by ISDS clauses—why on earth didn't Australia try to do it? Why wasn't Minister Ciobo making sure, at the negotiating table, that Australia was looked after and the Australian people were looked after? To give credit where credit is due, kudos to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. She deserves a big tick for standing up for her nation, her people and her companies and making sure that sovereign risk is looked after from the New Zealand perspective. Those side letters commit New Zealand and these other countries to not applying ISDS provisions to each other. But Australia absolutely missed the boat when it came to being able to do that.

These ISDS provisions are routinely used by multinational corporations to attack governments for doing what governments are supposed to do—namely, regulating in the interests of their communities and their citizens. Let's have a few quick examples of this. In 2016, Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed an ISDS dispute against the government of Colombia over the government's plans to reduce the price of patented treatment for leukaemia. So a big pharma multinational went and sued the Colombian government because the government wanted to make medicine cheaper for their citizens who are suffering from leukaemia. How on earth is that reasonable, just or fair? It is not, yet these are the types of provisions and behaviours that are being endorsed by the Australian government, the Turnbull government—the current, Turnbull government—and their Minister Ciobo in signing Australia up to these dangerous agreements under the TPP. We are opening ourselves up to big multinational companies coming after us.

Senator Sterle talked about the provisions in the TPP that have carved out big slabs from countries that will be exempt from labour-market testing. These are the same big multinational companies who don't just want to bring in their own workforce—to push down wages, to push down conditions and to take jobs away, particularly from young Australians—but they also want to hand these big multinational companies the opportunity to sue the government and to hold the Australian people to ransom. There is no need or reason for ISDS clauses. When they went back in to negotiate the TPP, the government should have used the opportunity to stand strong, to have the ISDS clauses withdrawn—they're not necessary—and to stand up for the rights of Australians and the sovereignty of a nation. This TPP arrangement is a deal for multinational corporations at the cost of local communities and governments. They've handed these big corporations everything they want on a platter, and now the Turnbull government want a big pat on the back and want us to say: 'Job well done.' Well, it was a terrible job, terribly done, and it should be rejected.