Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, read the letter containing the matter of public importance, a couple of times, and it does bear repeating. It says:

The only solutions that the Liberal and Labor parties have to inequality and wage stagnation come straight from the neoliberal handbook, like ever-increasing company tax cuts and free trade deals that hurt workers.

I didn't know what a neoliberal was until Senator McGrath stood up and owned up to being one. Now I've got some idea of what a neoliberal is. If you google it, you'll find it talks about something in the 19th century that has become a resurgent philosophy for some.

I've seen Senator Siewert's contributions in this chamber and I've seen her contributions in committees, and I would say that she always comes from a reasonably well thought out position. It's very clear she's very passionate—articulate, coming from the right place—about a lot of these issues, and they are deeply felt. This MPI looks like it's been drawn up by the 16-year-old in the office who wants to be in TheWest Wing or some other place, because it's not of a standard that we should be debating. It's from a party that's got a very small vote that wants to get a vote that's a tiny bit bigger, and it's got to appeal to that other half a person that it hasn't quite got in its corner yet. It really is pretty ordinary stuff.

For goodness sake, we know that there's division in the Greens party. Former Senator Rhiannon would have been at one end and other members would have been at the other end of the party room when they debated this sort of stuff. But, honestly, it's pretty low quality. I think it's a pretty ordinary attempt to get a debate going, which is an attempt to get them a couple of extra votes. But let's go to the issues they have raised.

Labor will deliver tax cuts. There's no argument about this. The Labor Party will deliver tax cuts for small and medium businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million a year, delivering certainty in this sector in a fiscally responsible way. Under Labor, small and medium businesses with a turnover of up to $50 million a year will have their tax rate reduced to 25 per cent by 2021-22. Labor have always been a friend of small business; let's not be shy about that. Small business is the engine room of employment. In my previous life, outside this place, I dealt with small business every day. Most of the people in transport are small businesses—thousands and thousands of them. Occasionally, you deal with the multinationals and the larger businesses, who employ lots of small businesses. So our supporting that measure for small business is no great surprise at all, but we'll accommodate the decision in our bottom line by delaying the introduction of the Australian Investment Guarantee by 12 months, building on our record of hard and sensible budget decisions to pay for priorities. There's no bashfulness on the Labor Party side about looking after small business in terms of tax relief.

If we go to the free trade agreements, this is where I do have some level of involvement and perhaps even, dare I say, some level of knowledge, having chaired the Senate inquiries into the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement, the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, the TPP-12 and the TPP-11. They have all come through the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, which I chair. So, over the years, we've had the ability to go through each and every one of those free trade agreements at length, and tax relief has been a very common feature of all of those free trade agreements.

When I had problems with those free trade agreements, I'd approach a minister or a cabinet secretary—say, the Hon. Joe Ludwig—and I'd say, 'Joe, this doesn't seem quite kosher; what's the deal here?' He would say, 'Name a Westminster government anywhere in the world that has its trade agreements approved by parliament.' And you'd go away and you'd have a look at all the Western-type governments anywhere in the world and see that free trade agreements are not approved by parliament; they are an executive prerogative of government.

The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties in this parliament, controlled by the government, has made serious recommendations about improving the way trade agreements are formulated, about transparency, about a national interest test and about—dare I say it—ISDS and labour market testing. There have been comments by the government controlled committee in this area. The Senate committee that I chaired held an inquiry into treaty making. It was called 'blind treaty', because essentially that's what all senators in this place are faced with. The treaties are negotiated by the department, usually in secrecy. They're finalised and signed before the parliament gets a look at national interest or before the joint standing committee looks at human rights implications or any of those things, and they're presented to the parliament as a fait accompli. When you dig into that, if you don't want to pass the customs tariff amendment or the enabling regulations, you're putting a sector of agriculture or business—wine, pork or dairy—at a competitive disadvantage.

The imperative to sign the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement was that if we didn't sign it we'd be six per cent worse off compared to American beef. The imperative in the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement was that we would face a higher quota than we currently had in competing against New Zealand, or against Chile. So these free trade agreements—I agree with Senator Cameron that it is the greatest misnomer in the world; there's nothing 'free' about these free trade agreements—are exceedingly detailed and complex. And usually, in Australia's case, they involve competition with New Zealand, the United States, Chile or anyone else who's got a very good product and has excess capacity and wants to supply into very valuable markets.

So we make no apology for having done what everybody in the last 25 years has done, which is pass the enabling regulation or custom tariff amendments to put into place free trade agreements, because the alternative is quite unpalatable: putting our very efficient export sectors at a commercial disadvantage compared with other nations and other sectors, and that is really not how we build prosperity, employment and opportunity in this country. I will say this: I do not agree with the absence of labour market testing. I do not agree that ISDS is a common feature of these agreements. If you actually look at the evidence that was put to the Senate committee inquiry into the TPP-11, there is only one sector that wanted ISDS. It wasn't agriculture. In fact, when we asked all the people who submitted, the only ones who actually had a view on it were the Minerals Council of Australia. Appropriately, they had a view that they needed ISDS in case they had an operation in Africa or some other jurisdiction with less-visible legal mechanisms than we currently have in our country or that are in most countries that we deal with. So, it's not a common thing for ISDS to be supported by anybody other than the Minerals Council of Australia. But we had a minister, the Hon. Steve Ciobo, who said, 'By hell or high water, I'm getting these things signed.' He didn't get the best deal. The TPP was started in 2010, and he didn't get the best deal. Senator McGrath said that there'd been seven free trade agreements signed. Well, the negotiations basically were: 'Let's get it done, because it's a political trophy. We can wave it around and get some votes out of it. We'll be saying that the Liberal Party's the one that can get things done.'

There is no national interest evaluation or assessment on these treaties. And, surprisingly, even though we've done about 230 treaties over 90 years, there's no historical assessment of them either. If you want to go back and work out what the net economic benefits of these treaties were, that's almost impossible to find.

If you press the government on what the economic benefit of these treaties is, they point to some think tank over there. My view is that we, the Senate and the House of Representatives, should be doing this under the national interest assessment. You should have quantified figures done by the Productivity Commission or some similar organisation. You should have transparency when you're negotiating all the clauses, and you shouldn't have anything that's against the national interest. But that's not the way that these treaty agreements are done in the Westminster system. Essentially, it boils down to this, and the department will tell you so if you press them: whatever the minister wants, the minister gets. Those are their instructions at the end of the day. If the minister wants it signed, it'll be signed, whether it's a good deal or a bad deal.