Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Customs Amendment (Product Specific Rule Modernisation) Bill 2018. I say from the outset that Labor will support this bill. Australia is a trading nation and economic growth is underpinned by our ability to sell our goods and services overseas, particularly in our region. It's undeniable that trade creates jobs, with one in five Australian jobs linked to trade.

This bill amends the Customs Act to streamline the product-specific rules of origin, otherwise known as PSRs—product-specific rules of origin—for four of Australia's free trade agreements. These agreements include the Singapore-Australia Free Trade Agreement, SAFTA; the Agreement Establishing the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area, AANZFTA; the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement, JAEPA; and China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, ChAFTA.

PSRs are essential components of free trade. They must be met by importers seeking preferential treatment for goods or products that include materials not originating in the territories covered by the agreement. For instance, you might have a piece of technology being imported into Australia that is made up of many components; however, some components are from territories not under the agreement. If the goods meet the requirements of the PSRs, they are considered to originate in the FTA party or country and are entitled to preferential treatment of customs duty, on import into Australia, under the Customs Tariff Act.

The PSRs are based on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding Systems. This is an international naming system for the classification of traded products. It currently covers thousands of commodity groups and is used by more than 200 economies as a basis for customs tariffs and the collection of international trade statistics. The amendments before the House seek to implement a functional and more streamlined system of PSRs. Each FTA has a separate PSR annex made of thousands of pages and is implemented domestically in rules-of-origin regulations for each agreement. However, there are also five-yearly revisions of the international harmonised system by the World Customs Organization. These revisions require countries that are signatories to free trade agreements to update their PSRs, which then means there are subsequent amendments to the rules-of-origin regulations.

The Customs Act recognises PSRs which were used at the time the agreement was negotiated, but then requires legislative change each time a new PSR is created. To combat this problem, the Customs Amendment (Singapore-Australia Free Trade Agreement Amendment Implementation) Act 2017 allows for changes to be made to the PSR without requiring additional legislative changes to the Customs Act. The bill before the House means that product-specific rules of origin can be updated without requiring subsequent legislative changes for the remaining free trade agreements Australia is a party to. The bill also has a number of subsequent amendments, including extending the recent update to the SAFTA to the chemical chapter origin rules. These minor amendments will ensure consistency between our legislation and the free trade agreement text in the Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, China, ASEAN and New Zealand FTAs. I want to make it clear that the amendments before the House are technical amendments and do not have any impact on the budget over the forward estimates.

Whilst the bill before the House deals with PSRs for four of Australia's free trade agreements, I want to take this opportunity to speak about Labor's plans to fix trade, broadly, in the context of the legislation. The Liberals have eroded Australia's trust in trade by signing trade agreements that have been negotiated in secret. The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government have not considered enough input from parliament, industry, unions and civil society groups, or the community about free-trade agreements they've entered into and bound Australia by. They're out of touch and they've neglected to undertake independent economic modelling. They've waived labour-marketing testing, meaning that companies can bring in overseas workers without checking if there is an Australian to do that job. They have included clauses that allow foreign companies the capacity to sue the Australian government, such as ISDS provisions. These are the types of things that make Australians, particularly those from my electorate of Blair in South-East Queensland and all the way across to Perth, very upset and even rightly angry. If you want more people in Australia to support free trade and open markets, then the government of the day has got to be more open and honest and trustworthy.

This is why yesterday the shadow minister for trade and investment introduced a private member's bill entitled A Fair Go for Australians in Trade Bill 2018. The bill will permanently fix the way Australia does trade agreements by putting Australian workers first and will stop future governments from signing up to trade deals that include clauses that allow foreign companies to sue the Australian government.

Our commitment is to ensure transparency, and the analysis of trade agreements doesn't stop there. We will strengthen the role of parliament by briefing the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties at the end of each round of free trade agreement negotiations; legislate to establish a system of accredited trade advisers from industry, unions and civil society groups who would provide real-time feedback on draft trade agreement text during negotiations; provide public updates on each round of negotiations and release draft text during negotiations, where this is feasible; and legislate to require an independent national interest assessment be conducted on every new trade agreement before it's signed, to examine the economic, strategic and social impact of any new trade agreement. These are all measures to make future free trade agreements Australia is signed up to better and fairer, and I commend the shadow minister for trade and investment, the member for Blaxland, for his tireless work to ensure a fair go for Australians in trade.

In conclusion, we urge the current Liberal government to take more care in negotiating free trade agreements. If they don't, Labor is committed to fixing these shortfalls should we be elected to government. Labor believes in a functional and streamlined trade system generally which delivers for all Australians and Australian businesses. This is why Labor will support these largely technical amendments in the bill before the House today.

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