Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I know the one you wouldn't have been able to do. Andrew Robb told me a story. He had a job KPI to do three free trade agreements in his first year as trade minister in 2013. Do you know the first one he did? The first one he did was South Korea, because it had been done, dealt and dusted. The only problem is the Labor trade minister couldn't sign the deal because the union said, 'You can't sign this deal with that ISDS provision in it.' So they didn't. Guess what? Andrew Robb came in on day 1, saying, 'That's fine. Great. There you go. Thank you,' because we were happy to sign up to those ISDS provisions.

I'll go through some of them. The deals that have an ISDS provision in them are the CPTPP, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement and the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement. Our agreements with Chile, Singapore, Thailand, ASEAN, Peru, Hong Kong and Indonesia all have ISDS provisions. The union movement have told this lot, 'You've got to revisit all those,' and all those free trade agreements are at risk because of that. Again, this is just ideological blindness.

When you look at the stats, what do the ISDS provisions mean? They mean that only once has another country questioned us on our free trade agreements and what we've done. It got defeated within our court process. They don't like hearing it, but 12 times has an Australian investment in another country been protected by the ISDS provisions. So they are actually working for people in Australia when they invest in other countries. But, again, we're not surprised. This is just another demonstration that the other side are owned and occupied by the trade union movement. So my question to the minister who disappeared is: are you going to risk our free trade agreements by abandoning ISDS provisions in existing free trade agreements? (Time expired)

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