Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

the electricity network that powers everyone's homes—most people would expect that you would at least advertise locally for people to work on it and that you would go overseas if you could not find local labour. Now you just have to call someone a contractual service supplier, or call them an installer under another provision, and you get to bypass all these so-called protections that have been negotiated and you just get to bring them in. That is why these so-called protections have massive holes in them and why we should not be supporting this agreement. It is another of the reasons that we should not be supporting this agreement. I could go on. There is nothing in this agreement about ensuring that minimum environmental conditions are not undercut. That could have been something that was negotiated and it is not there. So we are given a take-it-or-leave-it agreement that, as I said, contains a provision that not even John Howard was prepared to sign up to.

We have, in many ways, a crossing of the Rubicon here. This parliament, with the full support of the opposition, is about to sign up to something that contains an ISDS clause—an open-ended ISDS clause. If we are about to do that—

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