Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the tabling of the text and the National Interest Analysis for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I thought I might begin where the member for Lyons finished by acknowledging all the work that gets done for this agreement and more broadly across all of the agreements—work done by our terrific officials at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and other agencies. These are the people who really put their backs into these agreements; they work around the clock. I have had the pleasure of working with some of them in other roles in this building and I do think that we should acknowledge and celebrate that we have among the best diplomatic and trade staff in the world. They do the best job for whoever the government is, and so we celebrate their role in this.

As the member for Lyons also noted, the negotiation for this agreement began under Labor in 2010. The work that we are talking about now began with Minister Crean, then came ministers Emerson and Marles before Minister Robb took over in 2013. So we should also mark—as the minister did in the chamber the other day and as the shadow minister for foreign affairs did—the work of all four ministers when it comes to this agreement that we are discussing today.

The whole country has a stake in us getting our trade agreements right. At a time when growth is sluggish—there is not a lot of growth to go around in the global economy and, indeed, in our own economy—we do need to find new markets and new opportunities for our businesses. We do need to seek out every single chance that our businesses can get to prosper and to employ more Australians.

This is an important step—the tabling of the text and the National Interest Analysis is an important step, as was the ceremony in New Zealand earlier in the week. But this is not the final step. I think that anyone who follows American politics, for example—as my colleague here, the member for Bruce, does—would understand that there is a long way to go in each of the 12 countries when it comes to agreeing to the terms of this deal. There is a lot of processed to be followed, whether that be in the US, via the Congress, or in each of the other countries and, indeed, here as well.

It is a very complex document—many thousands of pages—and the opportunity for us here in this place and, indeed, for people right around the country, is to have input into this conversation through the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. That process begins soon, and that is a very important one for people to get the opportunity to have their say. We will follow that process very closely, because we do think that is the best way to hold these agreements up to the light, to understand everybody's points of view and to come to a well-considered view at the end of the day.

The objectives of the TPP are well known. They are largely shared, I think it is fair to say. It is a huge agreement, covering those 12 countries in the region. They are 12 very important countries; a combination of well-established economies as well as emerging economies, including, for example, Vietnam. They collectively cover something like 40 per cent of global GDP. Something like a third of our goods and services exports went to these countries in 2014.

As the shadow minister for foreign affairs said when she responded formally to the minister's statement—the first one to respond on our behalf—we do recognise that there are potential benefits. We do however have some fairly substantial concerns as well, which the member for Perth ran through and no doubt the member for Wills will run through as well when he gives his contribution. But we do as a baseline recognise that there are potential benefits in the TPP and also in other agreements of its kind. From a personal point of view, I am a big believer in trade's capacity to create jobs and opportunities. I do think it is worth noting in this agreement that we are talking about the elimination of something like 98 per cent of tariffs on our goods and also some substantial access for our services.

When we talk about these deals, the goods aspect is fairly easy to understand and quite often the side of the equation that is talked. But, as far as I am concerned, services are the hope in our economy and we do need to be seeking more markets and more opportunities for our service providers in our economy. In this particular deal, in terms of services, we are talking about professional services, financial services, education, telecommunications, health, hospitality, tourism and government procurement. When you think about the businesses in our economy, those are really crucial ones for us. We need to see them succeed if we are to create the jobs of the future—the jobs that people who are graduating from school and university now can fill and prosper in. Those categories of jobs are really the ones that we will need to lean very heavily on.

It is true that one of the main gaps in this debate is over the economic benefits of the TPP and, indeed, the other deals that have been signed by the government. It is our view—it is certainly my view—that the government would do themselves a real favour if they committed to actually modelling in a robust and defensible way, and perhaps an independent way, the claims that are made at the beginning of these negotiations and then at the final stage, so that people can come to a rational view of the various trade-offs and various opportunities that are central to this kind of debate.

I was involved in a very good committee that dealt with some of these issues. The committee recommended that these deals be modelled. Otherwise, we are relying on other bodies—American bodies like the US Department of Agriculture and the Peterson Institute and that World Bank material that came out not so long ago which talked about the benefits for the various countries in the region. We do think that the claimed benefits should be modelled in a way that is robust, defensible and credible, so that we can weigh up the costs and opportunities of these deals. There are some positive additions or inclusions in the deal. These are things around logging, fisheries and biodiversity. There is a chapter labour standards. It is not without its faults but it does deal with issues like the minimum wage and the ability to organise and there are also some points about inclusive development.

But as I said before and as the member for Perth said—and the member for Wills will say and no doubt the member for Fremantle will say—our concerns here are not insignificant. We do have some concerns with this deal. We think the JSCOT process, because it will let us hold up to the light some of the things that we are concerned about. The ISDS of course is a major concern for this side of the House. So that will be a feature of our investigation. There is also the issue of pharmaceuticals. We want to make sure that the cost of medicine is not forced up. There is a whole range of complex issues at play there which I do not have time to go into. Also, as the member for Perth said, there are labour mobility issues.

These issues will be central to the committee process and to the public input of people who are invited here and come here to give their views. Those factors will no doubt be really central to other people's concerns. On that note I do want to thank the various organisations around the country that email us and provide their views to us. No doubt everybody here today has an inbox full of emails about the TPP from both sides—heavily weighted on one side, of course—but I wanted to thank everyone who does take the time to feed in those views.

This deal is not without its critics. I have already said that I think there are substantial upsides that we need to consider, but also those not insignificant concerns that we have. For our part, on our side of the House we do want good trade agreements. We consider them on balance. We understand that you cannot get everything you want when you are talking about 12 important countries in our regions, so we consider them on balance and we come to a considered view. We take the time to hold them up against the claims that are made by the government to make sure that those claims are real and that they can be robustly identified. Then we vote for what is best for Australia as a whole, but really for the workers and the businesses that make up the Australian economy.

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