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

What a Liberal-Labor trickle-down love-in this whole debate has been. We've been treated to a whole evening of evidence-free neoliberal liturgy—'Trust us. Pass this free trade agreement and manna will fall from heaven. We can't tell you how much, even though we've got Treasury modelling coming out the wazoo. We can't actually point to a single dollar of benefit for you, but trust us. There is wonderful. Sign it away. This is all upsides and no downsides.' Liberal and Labor have even been competing for ownership of trickle-down economics. We even had one Labor MP get up and say, 'Not only was this idea; we are the Labor Party, and you should support us because we are for free trade, not fair trade.' We had the Labor Party getting up in here and saying: 'We are not for fair trade. That's why you should support this agreement.' What absolute rot.

It's no wonder this agreement is being pushed through with only a few speakers, because even the most moderate push on this house of cards makes it tumble down. This is not a free trade agreement. This is another one of those things that countries sign up to trade away sovereignty and give corporations greater rights to influence public services and how governments act. We already have free trade agreements with most of the countries that are covered by this legislation. That is why there's no benefit that can be pointed to from signing this—because the countries that are part of this are already, by and large, covered by free trade agreements.

What this agreement does is to give corporations in those countries additional rights to come in and interfere with what the Australian government might want to do for the Australian people, and it's critical to understand how that works. At the moment, governments in this country, because people demand it, do things like invest in the public sector—in child care, in aged care. We then put in place protections around those services, because people here expect those protections. Apart from in a few fields that the government has bothered to exempt, basically this legislation says, 'You're not allowed to increase protections in these fields anymore.' Corporations from overseas could attack you and sue you for taking steps to lift the welfare of your population. That's what this legislation does. We know this because the government has carved out exceptions for some areas. But there are others where it hasn't, and one of those is aged care.

During the royal commission we saw with crystal clarity what happens when we don't regulate the aged-care sector enough and we hand over the care of our older people to billionaires who are more interested in driving Maseratis and paying executive bonuses than they are in looking after people. We have seen that privatisation of aged care has been a mistake. We have seen that looking after our older people should be done for care and for the public good, not for profit, because those who try to do it for profit squeeze money out of it by denying people care. We saw what happened when people went into some of those aged-care institutions. It was so bad that we had a royal commission into it, and we were told, as part of that royal commission, that we had to regulate the sector better.

The Greens think we should end privatisation, the for-profit nature of the sector, and run it for the public good, but we've been told that we've got to regulate better. This legislation impinges on, and potentially removes, our right to do that. The government has been called out. Submission after submission to the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties said that we would be opening the door to unscrupulous, overseas based big corporations, who we can't regulate, coming in and owning parts of our aged-care sector, and that we would be powerless to lift standards in our aged-care sector. Even if overseas corporations aren't coming in, we may be prevented from doing it anyway.

And it's not just aged care; it's other areas as well. One of the areas that have not been preserved by the government is environmental services. What does that mean? We don't know, but it could mean that if we have a change of government—kick this mob out and put the Greens in balance of power to push the next government to start taxing the billionaires and investing in renewables—and start to put in place regulations to reduce emissions or say, 'We want to grow a publicly owned renewables sector,' overseas corporations could come in and say: 'No, you're not allowed to do that. When you signed up to this deal you forgot to carve out that particular thing and protect it. Sorry; your regulations are frozen in time.' Another way of saying it is: this deal will bind future parliaments and stop them improving regulations for the welfare of the people of this country.

This has happened time and time, because these agreements give big corporations a greater right to sue governments. They also weaken and carve out big holes in our labour laws. In this country it should be a basic principle that, no matter where you come from or what kind of visa you're on, local rates and conditions apply; you can't carve out exceptions to our labour laws. Local rates and conditions apply, and, if governments want to say that, in particular sectors, you have to advertise locally first, they should be able to do it. If you're coming to working here, local standards should apply as well. Everyone who comes in should meet the Australian standards.

These free trade agreements, which are getting the big rubber stamp and being frozen in time by this legislation, carve out huge loopholes in that—loopholes big enough to fly planeloads of exploited overseas workers through. That is terrible for those workers, because they're just doing the right thing by themselves and their family. They see an opportunity to come and work in Australia, and, in many respects, we should encourage that. But it should be on the basis of people coming in to fill jobs where we haven't been able to get people locally. Then, when they are here, they should get local wages and conditions and they should have pathways to permanent residency. Instead, what all the free trade agreements have done is say, 'No, we're going to carve out certain categories where labour market testing and the local standards you might expect of your electrician, for example, don't have to be applied to people who come through.' Instead of closing these loopholes, the Labor and Liberal parties are freezing them.

This agreement contains no labour chapter; it doesn't contain a chapter protecting and advancing labour rights. You might say, as someone on the Labor side did: 'Well, we tried to get one in. We couldn't do it. It would have been great if we had got it in, because we could have taken a step forward, but it's not like anything bad is going to happen because there's no labour chapter. At least we're not going backwards.' That's wrong. This is a deal with countries that we know use forced labour. We know that because, when it suits the government, they get up and talk about the Chinese government's oppression of the Uighurs and forced labour camps. They rattled the sabre around for Donald Trump when it suited them to do that and said, 'We've got to take that on,' but then they go and sign a deal with countries that engage in forced labour practices and say, 'The Australian government can't regulate to protect Australian businesses from competing against them.' In other words: this is going to be forcing Australian businesses to have to compete for jobs with countries that we know engage in forced labour practices and other forms of human rights abuses. So it's putting Australian corporations at a disadvantage, and it's tying future governments' hands so that they're not able to regulate it, because regulations get frozen in time.

The icing on the cake is that, at a time when there has been a military coup in Myanmar and there's a junta in charge—and the United States is saying, 'Hang on; we need to bring significant pressure, including economic pressure, to bear on this country'—the Australian government is saying, 'Let's go and sign a trade deal with Myanmar and the junta there.' No. That gives them the biggest endorsement you could imagine. When the Australian government says, 'We are going to sign up to that,' all of the words from the Liberal and Labor parties about protecting human rights vanish into nothing. It is clear that the dollar speaks the loudest—the big corporations who want to undermine our ability to regulate to protect our citizens and the people who live here. As to other countries which don't have the same standards that we and workers have been able to secure here, now this government and Labor are saying: 'Well, we don't believe in fair trade. We believe in free trade, and you're going to have to be forced to compete with them. If they've got lower standards than we do in Australia, we're sorry; it's just bad luck.' And any future government that wants to try to mend it by lifting the standards is going to find itself potentially at a huge disadvantage.

Given all the downsides, you would imagine that the government and Labor, who want this legislation rushed through, would be coming in here with a whole list of upsides and say, 'This industry over here is going to benefit by $3 billion, that one over there is going to benefit by $5 billion and that one over there is going to benefit by $6 billion. So, yeah, there are trade-offs but it's worth it.' You would imagine that they might say that. But there has been nothing—not a sausage. Why? It's because this is a facade—that's why. This is a façade that is designed to give corporations greater rights than governments and to put Australian companies and workers at a disadvantage.

You just need to look at the government's own words in the regulatory impact statement. You would imagine they would be trumpeting this in the documents that accompany it. But, no, we see:

Given the relative quality of Australia's existing FTAs with RCEP parties, including the CPTPP, we do not expect RCEP goods market access commitments to provide Australia with additional market access with our current FTA partners.

That's the national interest analysis—no additional market access. This is what the government are saying. They say, 'Well, it's not really going to help with tariffs.' As they say in the national interest analysis:

Under our existing FTAs, Australia will already have eliminated tariffs on imports from all RCEP parties by 1 April 2021.

So it's not going to help with tariffs. The national interest analysis goes on:

There are no costs in losses of tariff revenue for Australia associated with the entry into force of the RCEP as—under existing FTAs—Australia will have already eliminated tariffs on imports from all RCEP parties by 1 April 2021.

Not a single dollar of benefit under the government's own national interest analysis. But it's not surprising.

It's not just been the Greens, working groups and international groups who have called out this sham. It's not often that you get the Greens and the Productivity Commission on the same page. What the Productivity Commission has said is that we keep signing up, Liberal and Labor, to these so-called free trade agreements with spurious promises of benefit to the country but it's never quantified. Even the Productivity Commission has said, 'Before signing up to these things, let's have an analysis of whether it is actually going to benefit people at all.'

The government and Labor march in here and the best they can say is to read from the national interest analysis from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which says that there will be no additional market access and not one single dollar but there are plenty of downsides and exposure for Australian corporations and workers. When that is the best that the government can put on it, when the ability to regulate our aged-care sector is at risk and when we are giving corporations the right to attack future governments because we are freezing in time protections, we should not support this legislation. If Liberal and Labor want to engage in a competition to say, 'Oh, no; this is actually ours,' it tells you why we have seen so many protections eroded in this country over so many years.

See this speech in context