Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi, your amendment would reset the clock because the sunset provision would see this legislation cease to have effect after 10 years, and the parliament of the day would then have to relegislate these matters at that point in time. It could do it beforehand. Of course, it could at any other point, beforehand or afterwards, revisit any of these terms as well. Any nation can withdraw from an agreement that it enters into. Any government could choose to do that down the track. A Labor government could potentially do it if the terms they've specified are not met, and then the parliament could jack tariffs back up again if it chose to do so. We need to remember, in terms of the nature of the amendments that we are actually debating here—the customs amendments—that is essentially the tariff rates and those tariff lines that exist.

So, yes, a future parliament could do that. There are built-in review mechanisms as part of the TPP. But, again, nothing prevents a future government or a future parliament from saying, 'There will be a comprehensive review of the CPTPP.' That's perfectly viable and feasible for down the track.

What is the problem, in particular, with your amendment, is not that it layers another review on top of the built-in review mechanisms that form part of the agreement already but that it has that drop-dead sunset provision which does then create the circumstance where Australia would be noncompliant with the terms of the treaty as it's negotiated, because we would be saying that there is, built into our implementing legislation, something that puts the tariffs back up unless the parliament were to relegislate it at a later point in time. So that's the problem of the noncompliance. That then leads to the risk of renegotiation at that point in time, and renegotiation is where I believe—and I would have thought that you would believe—it is far better to start those negotiations at a point where each nation's tariff barriers are at the lowest possible point to get even better agreements than to be negotiating at a point where everybody goes back up to where they were before.