Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Can I thank the member for Rankin for allowing me to precede him in this debate—

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He is very much a gentleman! I am very keen to make a brief contribution on this, but there is a great deal more to be said about this agreement in the coming months. I start off by recognising that opening up international trade in a general sense is a good thing. I believe that more commerce between nations can lead to those in poverty being raised up. I do acknowledge that. And it can, of course, establish great mutual interest in peace and stability. I accept that. I also accept that Australia is a trading nation and that there is a clear benefit to our producers from reducing tariffs and other trade barriers. The Minister for Trade has set out at considerable length the benefits that are contained in the TPP, and we welcome those benefits. But we are not getting from the minister a clear-eyed assessment of the net benefit—the cost-benefit. What we see is a great deal of spruiking about the swings but virtually a denial of the roundabouts. Of course, we go through a pro-forma process. We have a document that is called the National Interest Analysis. But this is a document that has been prepared by DFAT, the organisation that has been overseeing the actual negotiation of the agreement. As someone put it, is like getting them to mark their own homework!

Reading through that document, it is a very shallow document. As one of my staff commented, it appears to be more like a set of ministerial talking points rather than a detailed analysis of those things that we could benefit from and those things that will reduce our benefit. I think we need to be very honest and transparent about the good bits and the bad bits, because without that we cannot get to that critical point of making an assessment of whether there is a net benefit in entering into this agreement.

One of the things I have spoken on for a number of these trade agreements is the asymmetry of the labour mobility provisions. In this agreement, that is contained in chapter 12. I think the first noteworthy point to make is that the US has opted out of this chapter altogether. The US has a very clear-eyed position about this, that it does not confuse immigration issues with trade issues and that it does not enter into arrangements about labour market mobility generally in its trade agreements. So the US has opted out altogether.

We have then established a series of side letters with those countries that want to participate with Australia in labour market mobility. We note, for example, Singapore—we have no side letter with Singapore. We have a side letter with Canada, and I have to say that as far as I can see there does seem to be reasonable symmetry with Canada so that the same sorts of people will be allowed into Canada as are allowed into Australia. So I do not have a problem with that. But when I look at Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico and Japan I think there is a very real case that there is asymmetry.

Fundamentally, we have a very misleading descriptor here. If you look at the chapter, it talks about the mobility of businesspersons. Now, when we go back into the annex and we go through the fine detail of the definition of that we see that 'businessperson' is a very broadly-defined category. Indeed, it includes any person with a trade or technical skill who can be employed by an existing Australian employer in Australia. So, fundamentally, it appears from what we can see that anyone who is on the list of eligibility for a 457 visa is eligible to come in from Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico or Japan without—and we believe this is a critical point—labour market testing. There is nothing in those side letters that requires labour market testing.

The other provisions of the 457 visa are included—the provisions about the payment of wages—but the provision in relation to labour market testing does not exist. The only side letter where it appears to be discussed is with Canada, and that is appropriate in the Canadian system because there is a degree of symmetry there in those provisions. We get what we give in the deal with the Canadians, as far as I can see.

So I think these are very real concerns. We need some great clarification from the government about the position of these tradespersons—trade- and technically-skilled people—about whether there will be labour market testing. I think that needs to be entrenched, somehow or other, in our legislative framework.

The other provision I want to raise is for the ISDS. I am sure that the member for Fremantle, who will speak on this issue, will go into this at some length. But I just want to make this statement: we need to look at this in a very rigorous way. I understand the reasons for why ISDSs were set up and what they were designed to protect. But, in reality, we have created an extra-judicial system. We have created a system where our rules—our sovereignty—are being overseen not by an international court but by a private arbitration system that is largely exercised by people who have a commercial interest and who have as their commercial clients the very companies that are seeking to take states on and to sue states over the legislative protections that they may seek for their people. Be it environmental policy, intellectual property or labour market rules that might be being legislated, these can be challenged by these large corporations. These cases are not heard by an international court; they are heard by private arbitrators who, in their day-to-day work, are the very people who represent those large corporations in other fora.

Justice French has made a very powerful argument against these. He said these arbitral tribunals set up under ISDS provisions are not courts, nor are they required to act like courts, and yet their decisions may include awards that significantly impact upon national economies and upon regulatory systems within nation-states. This is a very real issue that we must address not only for this agreement but also more generally. I believe we should be moving towards an international court if we are going to have these ISDS provisions. Again, thank you to the member for Rankin; I look forward to us having a very serious debate on this topic over the next few months.

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I always enjoy the contributions by the member for Perth, and I am disappointed that she left 1½ minutes on the clock.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement was finally signed on 4 February this year in New Zealand. Australia was represented by Minister Andrew Robb, who has been the deliverer of so much good news for my electorate of Lyons and certainly the state of Tasmania in respect of the trifecta of trade agreements that have been negotiated since the coalition came to government in 2013. The KAFTA and the Japanese economic partnership agreement, and more recently the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, have delivered enormous benefits to businesses in my state. It is very much in line with the absolute culture and focus that this government has on generating growth, creating opportunities, and for businesses to invest and, ultimately, employ, in our case, more Tasmanians.

We are, in our state, quite mature in the way that we view foreign investment more broadly—notwithstanding some of the issues that the member for Perth raised. I acknowledge her concerns, and these are issues that need to be clarified. But in large part, I sometimes misrepresented it in the way of a scare campaign. As I said, in my state, Tasmanians have been very mature about these sorts of issues in recent times. There are many practical benefits to come to my state as a result of that, and I will highlight a few of those in a minute.

This is a culmination of many years' work. This is a culmination that included work by previous governments, including previous Labor governments. The work that has been concluded by Minister Robb did demand a certain level of resolve. They have delivered what is a modern agreement. There are obvious benefits in tariff removals in respect of the commodities that Australia more broadly, but certainly my state, is obviously able to supply, and this is clear to most people. The tariff removals allow better access to those markets; therefore, they create additional competition and they create confidence for businesses to invest in their own businesses and employ more Tasmanians. But they also have unlocked the potential that really stands there for this country as a developed First World country. More than 70 per cent of the Australian economy is driven by the services sector, and yet a relatively small part of our exports are made up of services—somewhere in the vicinity of 15 per cent.

The opportunity that these agreements present for our services sector to deliver high quality services in a whole range of areas is quite tantalising, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region and, in the case of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, more broadly. There are opportunities for small and medium businesses as well, and there has been a real emphasis within this agreement to make sure that small and medium enterprises see and capitalise on those opportunities.

The procurement of government services in the trans-pacific partnership countries presents enormous opportunities for many Australian businesses that have the skills and capacity—for example, particularly in my own state, for those businesses that are providing environmental approval processes and those sorts of things. These are things that a developed, modern country like Australia, which has very stringent regulations around these spaces, has. These are the sorts of things that are going to be in very high demand in the countries that have signed up to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

There is still a lot of work to go. In each of those countries local politics will come into play in terms of seeing this agreement ultimately ratified and brought into law in those individual jurisdictions. For the record, those 12 countries are: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. Last year I had the opportunity to travel to Vietnam, and it was interesting to see in the English printed newspapers the interest that country had in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Over the course of the week and a half that I was there, I noted numerous articles that referred to the negotiations that were going on at that time.

We already have the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement, so one might reasonably ask the question: what are the benefits for Australia—and Japan for that matter—in respect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement? In respect of Australia, there are additional concessions for dairy exports that have been made in terms of access to that market, specifically in relation to manufactured dairy products, and that is a really good thing for Tasmania.

Over 98 per cent of the dairy product that is produced in Tasmania is processed locally, mainly up on the north-west coast. Tasmania is nearly the second largest producer of milk in the country. It is not quite there yet, but I think within two years we will probably overtake New South Wales as the second largest dairy producer. I have been made aware of plans and opportunities in my own electorate for expanded capacity in that area that will provide opportunities. So whether it is cheese, milk powder or other value-added products, those opportunities are very broad and wide.

In respect of agriculture more broadly the obvious beneficiaries for my state, in addition to dairy, are beef; wine exports, where there are significant reductions or elimination of tariffs into Mexico and Canada, Peru, Malaysia and also Vietnam; and seafood, notwithstanding the issues that we have at the moment with the POMS disease that has come down from New South Wales and is now, unfortunately, impacting on oysters in the Tasmanian jurisdiction. I spoke last night to Craig Lockwood from St Helens, and it is a real concern to them. But I am sure they will work through that, and they are developing resistance within those breeding stocks as we speak.

The elimination of many tariffs will benefit consumers in terms of the costs of goods that are available in this country. When I look at these things, I try to be aware of the concerns that are raised. I do not have an issue with those concerns being raised and debated—for example, by the member for Perth and others. That is right and proper, and it is what this place is ultimately about.

But from Australia's perspective—and I will bring it back to my local patch in Tasmania, to my electorate—ultimately it is about backing our own strengths. It is about focusing on those things for which our country has a competitive advantage. This agreement, overwhelmingly, provides the opportunity for our country to be able to capitalise on those things that we do comparatively better than similar countries which produce those sorts of goods.

I welcome this. I congratulate the minister. I also congratulate, particularly, the departmental staff who over many years have worked extremely hard to be able to deliver a modern agreement that will serve our nation very well into the future. It will provide opportunities for so many businesses. I guess that my ask of those businesses and those innovative people who I know are all over the electorate of Lyons is to seek out the opportunities. See this as an opportunity to have a much bigger market than the one that is on the doorstep. We are a small country by population size, we are big country by geographic size but we are perfectly located in the Asian region in order to take advantage of the growing middle class there, that has a high demand for the quality goods and services that Australia is able to produce.

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

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier this week I spoke in this place about a petition received by the cross-party group on the TPP from GetUp! and SumOfUs that had been signed by more than 305,000 Australians who say 'no' to the TPP. The parliamentary group also received a letter addressed to members of parliament from the Australian Fair Trade & Investment Network, or AFTINET, on behalf of 59 community organisations representing two million Australians. I seek leave to table the letter and the list of signatories.

Leave granted.

The concerns expressed in the letter appropriately sum up the major reasons why this parliament should be supporting the call for independent assessments of the text prior to the agreement being ratified. Those calls are that there should be an independent assessment of TPP economic costs and benefits as offered by the Productivity Commission, including costs and risks to government of ISDS and an extension of medicine and copyright monopolies; as well as an independent health, environment and human rights and labour rights assessment for the TPP.

It seems that the outrageously predatory behaviour on the part of tobacco companies in not respecting the laws and courts of sovereign nations and the public outcry over this behaviour has at least led to ISDS cases against tobacco regulation potentially being excluded under the terms of the TPP text. However, the other issue where the trade minister claims to have had a big win in TPP negotiations relates to the issue of market exclusivity for biologics. Under the relevant agreement in the TPP:

There would be market exclusivity for biologics provided through one of two options: at least eight years of data protection or at least five years of data protection and other measures to deliver a comparable outcome in the market.

As Dr Debra Gleeson of the School of Psychology and Public Health at La Trobe University has written about this:

The provisions relating to biologics are problematic and ambiguous. They appear to commit countries to providing either eight years of clinical trial data protection or five years of clinical trial data protection along with other measures to deliver comparable outcomes. While the Australian government has said that the regime for biologics in Australia will not change, the language leaves room for continued pressure by the United States to ensure that TPP countries prevent biosimilars from entering the market for eight years. The definition of biologics is very broad and likely to limit countries’ flexibility in determining the scope of the obligation. A review by the TPP Commission of both the length and scope of protection after 10 years provides a further mechanism for US pressure to expand and extend monopolies on expensive biologics.

So, rather than actually having achieved a protection for the five-year exclusivity period as claimed by the trade minister, it seems that that is not at all what the agreement does. It gives a very broad opening for companies to insist on eight years of data protection or five years of data protection and other measures to deliver a comparable outcome in the market. Undoubtedly this will ultimately impact in the cost of medicines going up.

For me, with the TPP the major issue is the investment chapter and investor state dispute settlement clauses because that is a chapter that magnifies the negative consequences and impacts of the other chapters. I have spoken about ISDS in this place before. I have noted the fact that foreign companies will have the power under the agreement to sue Australia in a private international tribunal for any laws, policies or court decisions that may impact upon their profits. With the exception potentially now of tobacco control, the trade minister has at various times described expressions of concern about ISDS as 'hysterical fear mongering'. But I would have to ask if the trade minister considers the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, the Productivity Commission, Nobel Prize winner Professor Joseph Stiglitz, or the UN special rapporteur on trade to be hysterical in warning against the inclusion of ISDS clauses in trade agreements?

And let's remember that these international tribunals hearing ISDS cases are not made up of independent judges but of corporate lawyers who can be acting for a multinational corporation one day and sitting on an arbitration panel the next. They do not apply any precedent and their decisions are not appealable, as Costa Rica has discovered to its detriment. Costa Rica was successfully sued for trying to protect endangered turtles even though there was supposed to be a carve out from environmental regulation.

Peru was sued by US led mining company Renco when a Peruvian court ordered Renco to clean up its lead pollution. This was another example of an environmental carve out that was ignored by the foreign investor and by the tribunal. Remember, if the tribunal ignores the very clear exemptions in the agreement, there is no appeal from the decision of the tribunal and so there is nothing you can do about it in any event.

We know that Egypt is being sued for raising the minimum wage. Germany is being sued for its decision to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima. El Salvador is being sued for refusing to issue a gold mining licence due to serious community health and environmental concerns. Canada is being sued for Quebec having put a moratorium on fracking pending an environmental review. Canada is being sued for a Canadian Supreme Court decision ruling two of Eli Lilly's medicine patents invalid.

In what I see as a supreme irony, given President Obama's vigorous championing of the TPP, just two months after the Obama administration rejected Trans Canada's bid to build the dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline—a landmark victory for the movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground—the Canadian corporation announced it would retaliate by suing the United States under ISDS provisions in NAFTA, which is a TPP-like trade deal. This bodes extremely ill for government attempts to regulate or even make decisions for the benefit of the environment. As an arbitrator from Spain, Juan Fernandez Armesto, observed:

When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all. Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restrictions or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.

Finally, I note that, according a comprehensive economic analysis by the World Bank, Australia stands to gain almost nothing from the TPP deal. The World Bank study shows that the TPP would boost Australia's economy by just 0.7 per cent by the year 2030 with the annual increase in growth being less than one half of one-tenth of one per cent. I think this analysis points to the reason behind the government's refusal to have any independent analysis and assessment of the TPP, because they are not sure that it will actually be shown to have any positive impact.

It does beg the bigger question of why a government would want to do this to its own people? To enter into an agreement that will bind its own hands, and the hands of governments into the future, to legislate and make policy in the public interest. It seems to me a fundamental breach of the public trust that holders of public office owe to the nation and the community at large.

I urge all concerned people to make submissions to the committees, including the treaties committee, that are looking into this matter and to take the opportunity now to call for the government to have independent assessments carried out. It is a very reasonable request and there does not seem to be any rational, reasonable reason that one would not have done that when one has the time. With other countries still needing to go through their processes for ratification, we should do the same.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

An economist and an ecologist are blown by a gust a wind off the top of a skyscraper and they are plummeting earthward. The ecologist is panicking, but the economist is resolutely calm. 'Why are you so calm?' asks the ecologist. 'Because demand will create a parachute' is the reply. Like the falling economist in the joke, we have not hit the ground and we may feel that we are doing fine, but if we were one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have left Africa and the Middle East in the past 12 months to embark on a perilous voyage across the Mediterranean, then the world would feel rather different.

For the past 30 years Australia has been undergoing an experiment and we have not been alone, many other countries have travelled the same path—free market liberalism. Its hallmarks have been globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, free movement of goods and free movement of people. Its advocates said it would strengthen the economy and make us 'more resilient to external shocks.' But far from making our economy more diverse and resilient, we have become narrow and vulnerable. We have much higher levels of unemployment than we did 30 years ago, we have much higher levels of youth unemployment, we have much worse long-term unemployment and we have serious problems of underemployment. We have much larger foreign debt and much larger budget deficits. The distribution of wealth between rich and poor is becoming less equal, and the social problems generated by frustrated ambition, drugs, crime, mental health problems and homelessness are on the rise too.

But the people who have dug us into this hole want us to keep digging. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is but the latest example. The Trans-Pacific Partnership contains investor state dispute settlement provisions, which allow foreign corporations to sue Australian governments in tribunals which have no independent judiciary, no precedents and no appeals. It commits to deliver up to three years' additional monopoly for biologic medicines, which will cost the PBS hundreds of millions of dollars each year. It locks in strong rights for copyright holders, but contains only weak labour rights and environmental standards which are unenforceable. It removes labour market testing for temporary migrant workers from five TPP countries, continuing the white-anting of labour market testing that we have seen with the Korea and China free trade deals—and this a recipe for more 7-Eleven-type rip-offs of students and other migrant workers.

When trade deals are signed, there is always much fanfare and triumphalism about how good they are going to be. For example, in 2004 John Howard said that the US trade free trade agreement would 'add enormous long-term benefits to the Australian economy.' But a decade later, the ANU academic, Shiro Armstrong, studied the agreement and concluded that all it had really done was to divert some trade from some other countries. Given all this, there should be an independent assessment of all the costs and all the benefits of the TPP before the parliament votes on it. That assessment should be carried out by the Productivity Commission. Bodies such as the ACCC, the Harper Competition Policy Review and public health experts and the like support this view.

I return to the question of labour market testing and the provisions of the TPP in this respect. Three months after releasing the TPP text, no Turnbull government minister has yet admitted publicly that it has, once again, negotiated away Australia's sovereign right to regulate key temporary visa programs in crucial areas. Australia has committed not to apply labour market testing or caps in the entire 457 visa program for all citizens of Canada, Peru, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Mexico—when El Chapo escapes again, you know where he will be making a beeline for—and for all foreign nationals who are employees of businesses in Canada, Peru and Mexico who transfer to an Australian branch of that business. On top of that, Australia has also made a standing offer to do the same for the three other TPP countries without a total 457 labour market testing exemption—that is to say: the USA, Peru and Singapore—if they provide access to limited categories of Australian businesspeople down the track.

The China free trade agreement concession not to apply labour market testing to installers and servicers of machinery and equipment on 400 visas has also been extended to eight TPP countries—Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Canada, Malaysia and Mexico.

The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network has forwarded to members of parliament a letter signed by 59 community organisations representing millions of Australians who are gravely concerned about the Trans-Pacific Partnership text. They say that the TPP:

Many independent commentators have argued that the TPP reduces democratic rights for claimed economic benefits which will not be delivered. A recent World Bank study of the TPP reported in the Sydney Morning Herald shows negligible economic benefits for Australia, because it already has free trade agreements with the US and Japan, and all but three of the other TPP countries.

The letter also notes:

There is also strong opposition to the TPP in the U.S. Congress from both sides of politics, with demands from conservatives to change the text to gain even more rights for pharmaceutical and tobacco companies. It would be foolish for the Australian Parliament to endorse the TPP when it is unlikely to be passed by the U.S. Congress in 2016.

As well as those 59 organisations, I note specific concerns being expressed by the Tertiary Education Union, which has undertaken an analysis of the implications of the TPP with specific attention to its impacts on education and educational services in Australia. They point out that chapter 9, the investment chapter, has the effect of locking in and intensifying pressures of commercialisation and privatisation. They say:

This means, a for-profit VET provider owned from overseas could demand compensation from the Australian government if they changed laws which meant that they could not enrol domestic students or could not access public subsidies where those requirements would mean a loss of investment.

I think that those are very serious and legitimate concerns.

It is noteworthy that there is strong resistance to the TPP in the US itself, including from both Democrat presidential contenders. I see this as one element of a quite conspicuous uprising against the big end of town agenda, which includes the free movement of goods and the free movement of people. You can see clear strands of this in US politics in its support for the insurgents Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. You can see it in the UK in the support for Jeremy Corbyn at one end of the spectrum and UKIP at the other. You can see it in the rise of populist antimigration, anti-European union parties in Europe.

I think corporate interests need to realise that continually pushing and fundamentally greedy globalist corporate agenda in opposition to the more democratic concept of nation states protecting the interests of their responsive citizens will generate nationalist pushback. To simply try to brush this aside as racist and xenophobic, as we saw in the debate over the China FTA, is a poor substitute for genuinely having regard to the impact of trade agreements on the capacity of citizens to democratically determine what kind of country and what kind of world they want to live in.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 12:50