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

This bill, the Government Procurement (Judicial Review) Bill 2017, will make it easier for multinational corporations to take the Australian government to court over how the Australian government spends its money, and Labor and Liberal are about to join together with the Nationals to vote for it. The trickle-down troika of Labor, Liberal and big business is trucking on and saying, 'How can we change the rules to make it easier for big multinational companies to come and restrict how this government wants to spend its money?'

Why are we here debating this bill? We're debating this bill, in the words of the government—which have been echoed by the opposition—because Australia has recently signed up to the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is a blueprint for giving corporations greater rights over everyday people, and also because the government wants to go off and negotiate another deal with the World Trade Organization that will make it easier for overseas companies to take the Australian government to court. The previous speaker has just said that he hasn't even seen the text of that, yet Labor and Liberal are about to pass this bill through this place.

This bill deals with what's called government procurement, which is about how government spends its money. We know that the government has some very deep pockets and can drive significant change and influence what Australia looks like by how it spends its money. The government can decide, when it awards contracts, that it is going to do so in a way that it thinks is of benefit to the local population. For example, it could say, 'We have a youth unemployment crisis in this country,' which we do, because under this government one in three young people either hasn't got a job or doesn't have enough hours of work, and it's at crisis levels that have not got better since the GFC, when we, together with the mining boom, effectively destroyed a huge number of manufacturing and entry-level jobs in this country. The government could, for example, if it wanted to—this government won't, but a good government could—say: 'We're going to spend our tax revenue to help young people get jobs and increase apprentices, and we're going to give priority to local businesses in doing that. We want to give some preferential treatment to local businesses, because we know that it's going to be better for the long run in this country if everyone has a sustainable, meaningful job.' You implement those things through your procurement policy. You set some rules about how government spends its money. When you do that, you can make the judgement calls about saying: 'Well, on paper, a bid from somewhere else might appear to be a couple of hundred thousand dollars cheaper, but by the time we factor in the people who will get a job if we give it to a local business and the avoided welfare costs of that, and the additional environmental benefits of doing it here locally and the ability to regulate local companies, perhaps on balance it's better.' That's why you have local procurement rules that can have preferential treatment built into them.

Big multinational companies don't like this, because they look at governments and they just see dollar signs. They see bank accounts and cheques being written for them. They want the right to come to countries, including Australia, and say: 'Well, hang on. We can sell you the product much more cheaply—perhaps because we're getting it made by someone in a country where we don't have to pay Australian wages—and we want the right to do that. We don't want to have our hands tied by you deciding that you might want to give preference to local businesses in some way.' So these big multinationals have got together and written a blueprint for a set of rules that will make it much more difficult for the Australian government to spend its money in a way that looks after its population. Those rules are found in things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and also in things like this procurement agreement being negotiated by the World Trade Organization.

What this bill does—and the reason that this gives us an entry ticket into the very bad TPP and the very bad WTO agreement—is allow a multinational company, when it hears about how the Australian government has decided to award a tender, to go to court to get an injunction to stop the government from proceeding. Why does it want to get an injunction, get compensation, run a claim against the government or take it to court? Because, if it can put a brake on the Australian government doing it, it can then go and lodge a complaint with the World Trade Organization or with some other body under the TPP, and have it resolved in an international forum behind closed doors where they apply the rule of trickle-down economics and don't care about governments looking after their own population.

Who is that going to work to the benefit of? I've heard the government and even the opposition saying: 'Actually, this is all right, because it works the other way around. Australian companies will be able to do the same overseas.' Do you really think that an Australian small or medium-sized business is going to have the capacity to go to the WTO and lodge complaints against overseas governments? No. This isn't going to benefit local businesses accessing overseas markets. This is designed to give a leg-up to multinational corporations against Australian small and medium-sized businesses. When a company has won the tender, looks like it's going to win the tender or has rules that appear to give preference to local companies for some very, very good reasons, all of a sudden it's going to find itself in court—not against another Australian company, but against an overseas company with much deeper pockets—facing an injunction, facing a compensation order and facing a complaint through a different authority before they go to the court. These new rights that companies will have are only going to work to the disadvantage of local companies.

This is why, in part, when the Senate looked at this, many senators, including government senators, said: 'Don't pass this. At the very least, don't pass it until we know what the final rules are that we're signing up to as part of this WTO agreement. Don't pass it until we know whether the TPP contains protections.' Well, now we know that it doesn't contain adequate protections. We now know that the senators who looked at it and said, 'Look, hang on for a moment,' were right to say that. Now we've got the TPP in front of us. We know that under the TPP the government did not remove the so-called ISDS provisions, the ability for companies to take the Australian government to court. Jacinda Ardern, over in New Zealand, had the good sense to negotiate some get-out clauses for New Zealand, but the Australian government did not. The Australian government doesn't care, so it signed up to these awful deals. It doesn't care that it's going to give corporations much more significant rights.

We now know that these deals have some huge traps in them. That's why the Greens think we shouldn't be signing up to them. That's why half of the Labor Party thinks that we shouldn't be signing up to them. That's why civil society thinks we shouldn't be signing up to them. That's why the ACTU—and the member for Batman when she was the head of the ACTU—put in a submission to the Senate inquiry to say, 'Don't rush ahead with this, because we can only see that this is going to disadvantage local businesses.' And they were right.

We've got an opportunity now to say: 'Let's park this bill until the opposition and everyone else gets to see the full text of this agreement.' They're coming in here, complaining they haven't. 'Let's park it until we've gone back and renegotiated the TPP to include some better protections for labour and the environment, and to remove the ability for corporations to sue governments.' That is the opposition's policy, so it should be unobjectionable to say: 'We're not going to rush this bill through until we've gone back and negotiated a better deal.'

So, as an amendment to the amendment moved by the opposition, I move the following:

That all words after "whilst" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the House appreciates the significance of this measure, the House defers further consideration of the bill until the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the World Trade Organization Agreement on Government Procurement contain:

(1) better protections for labour rights, the environment, and local business; and

(2) no investor-state dispute settlement provisions".

I'm moving that amendment, which the member for Denison is going to second, because it is no good to sit in your party room and say, 'We don't agree with the TPP,' or, 'We don't agree with these deals that the government is negotiating secretly,' but then, when you have the opportunity on the floor of parliament to do something about it, when you've got the most precious thing that the Australian people trusted you with when they elected you—which is your vote in this place—go and vote with the government to fast-track this bill through. We should not be pushing this bill through when we absolutely do not need to. This bill has been sitting around for a while. It could very reasonably sit and wait until the TPP has gone back and been renegotiated.

I'm very sceptical of the Labor Party's view that it somehow is going to be in this magical position where it can renegotiate the TPP, if and when it gets elected—and I do hope there's a change of government at this election. But the idea that Labor's putting out there, that we can go back and renegotiate it, is fanciful. That's why we've separately moved to park the TPP agreement as well. We should not be signing up to that. But it's crystal clear that, even if you think that's right, even if you think that the new Prime Minister is going to be a negotiator who's going to be able to go back and take all these terrible clauses out of the TPP, then we should not pass this bill now. Wait until all of that has happened. So I'm moving what is a very simple, reasonable and unobjectionable amendment to park consideration of this until we have that opportunity.

I must say, by way of comparison, that I personally wish that the government were willing to allow people the freedom of movement to the same extent that they're allowing it for multinational corporations. If you're some person who has suffered torture, war or famine and you decide that you want to come to this country to make a better life here and to contribute, this government locks you up. Even if you are an 11-year-old child, this government, with the support of the Labor Party, will lock you behind wire until you no longer have the will to live. As we've heard this week, 11- and 12-year-olds are now saying that they no longer have the will to live, and a 12-year-old girl has reportedly set herself on fire in a camp under our watch. So, if you're a person who wants nothing more than to come here and seek a better life, you get locked up until you die or you kill yourself. But if you're a multinational company wanting to come here, Labor and the Liberals roll out the red carpet and say: 'What protections would you like us to remove? You're welcome here. The door is open. Don't worry; if you think there are any pesky rules that we've set up that might give benefits to the local Australian population, feel free to take us to court.'

What the government and the opposition don't seem to understand is that we keep playing by rules that no-one else plays by, in the hope that somehow it's going to result in the economy magically growing. Yet speaker after speaker from the Labor Party comes in here and says, correctly, that there's no evidence that these deals deliver any meaningful benefit for the Australian population at all. It's not often that the Greens and the Productivity Commission are on the same page, but they are on this one. They've said that the tangible benefits of these deals are overstated and that we should know about them before we sign up.

So let's find out first, before we sign up. Before we give a blank cheque, let's park this bill. I am going to oppose it, but I imagine others might support it. At the very least, everyone should agree to park it until we have gone back and put some things in those multinational agreements that reflect what the Australian people want and, probably, what the majority of this parliament want as well. It is time to stand up, use the vote and support this amendment.

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