Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Joyce for speaking up. I will make some explanation to Senator Joyce in response to some of the things he said. Firstly, objecting that a motion to establish a Senate committee inquiry be taken as formal is a positive way to allow a debate to take place—otherwise there is no debate. I have been here a fairly long time now and the process is that you deny formality in a positive sense to allow this very type of debate that Senator Joyce has kicked off and that I am following him in to take place. Had I not done that, there would have been no debate. That is the first point.

The second point is that it is not unusual. I think Senator Joyce said he had never seen it used before. It is used frequently—in fact, it has been used about a dozen times a year. My statisticians tell me that it has been used well over 100 times in the last decade and very often it is to promote the very type of debate we are having. So, quite contrary to objecting to the motion being taken as formal, I have used this mechanism, because I am savvy about forms of the Senate, to enable this debate to take place.

Furthermore, I agree with Senator Joyce that we do need a Senate inquiry into this important matter. That is why I moved this very motion, using these exact words, yesterday—and Senator Joyce voted it down. Today he has put forward the same motion. We are discussing that motion and I will be supporting it. Why the day’s delay I simply do not know, but that is maybe because I have a little better understanding of the process of the Senate and am better able to apply it than the Leader of the Nationals in the Senate.

It is important that the debate proceeds, and I can reassure Senator Joyce that the motion has the support of the Greens and, I trust, will be passed by the Senate. He said that it had been debated in the Standing Committee on Economics and that there was a general feeling that this matter, which is hugely important, ought to be brought before the Senate and put forward as a matter for the committee to look at. That is well and good, but a committee is not a replacement for the Senate. It is the Senate that has the say on this. That is why on Monday in the Senate I gave notice that I would move a motion on the matter and that is why there is no difference, through you, Madam Acting Deputy President, between Senator Joyce’s position and mine—it is just that I brought it to the Senate a day earlier and it was voted down.

Having cleared the air on that, I agree with Senator Joyce on much of what he has had to say—including that this is too important for us not to get some more information on it. The point of view I have is not against investment in Australia’s mining industry or any other industry. There is a very clear difference between an investment which is a takeover, effectively, which gives a controlling say in part or all of operations—and this proposed investment by Chinalco will do that as far as some mining operations are concerned here in Australia—and an investment which is simply for the sake of making good, getting profits.

This investment has the potential to give Chinalco the deciding say in what happens in some mining operations here in Australia and elsewhere around the world, because Rio Tinto is a truly global mining corporation. It is a corporation that has, however, its biggest mining operations here in Australia. What is the difference between Rio, which has its headquarters in St James’s Place in London, and Chinalco, which has its headquarters in Beijing? A very big one. I think Senator Joyce and I have a lot of agreement on lots of points here.

I am one who says that there should be more transparency in the capitalist system in the corporate area. They are always demanding—and I agree with this—transparency in government. Commercial-in-confidence—isn’t that amazing? The corporate sector has been able to close down on matters where its interests are at stake, even in the public sector. But, when you get to the private sector, there is far too little transparency here in Australia. It is very difficult for even parliamentary committees to get information out of the corporate sector about what is going on there. We ought to be able to, freely, because it is in the interests of shareholders and Australians that we are better able to put a searchlight on the corporate sector in Australia. At least we are able to regulate. Parliament is supreme. The people put the representatives in here in a democratic system and then we work out the laws. My view is that the lobbying of the big corporations is right out of sync in a democracy with one person, one vote, one value.

But a different thing arises when you are dealing with a police state—and that is what China is. In Beijing, if Senator Joyce were to get some folk there to establish a National Party, and I know if I were to get some folk over there to try to set up a Greens Party, they would end up breaking rocks in the Gobi Desert for a long, long time. I do not say that lightly. Democrats—people who have a different point of view from the Communist Party in Beijing—are dealt with extremely harshly. They effectively lose their livelihoods and their wherewithal. They can be under house arrest or indeed worse—effectively in concentration camps—for long periods of time. One does not have to believe me on this. Go to the US State Department’s reports on human rights in China and one will see that.

When we look at Chinalco we see that it is not effectively a private enterprise that has grown in the new China; it is part of the state apparatus. For example, its officers can be appointed and can be sacked by the presidium in China. Well, they are; it is not that they can be. They are appointed and they are sacked by the Communist Party supremos in China. That is very, very different to the corporate system in the democratic countries of the world.

It is important that we understand that this particular effective takeover—in at least some areas of Rio’s activities in mining Australia—leads to the direct ability of control, despite the denials by the Chinese officials, by the Communist Party supremos in Beijing. That is a great problem. If we were seeing an opening up, a flowering of democracy, in China, this would be a much different matter, but we are not. Therefore, we have to be aware of what Australia is getting into. I can reassure Senator Joyce on one point: if the Foreign Investment Review Board does agree with this investment by Chinalco in Rio Tinto, that will not be the end of it. The Treasurer will then have to decide. Effectively that would be an executive decision by the Rudd Labor government as to whether or not the investment would proceed in the wake of the Foreign Investment Review Board’s advice.

When you look at the OECD’s foreign investment restrictive index—and it is important to look at this index because it sort of measures the freedom of Australian companies to invest in China vis-a-vis the freedom of Chinese investors in Australia—you find that, on a list of OECD nations and then all the biggest non-OECD nations, China is the most restrictive. It has an index of over four. Australia is in the midrange of the least restrictive. It is at 0.28. I can go into detail, but I will not here—the inquiry is the place for that. All I am saying is that there are far greater restrictions on Australian corporations investing in China than there are on Chinese companies investing in Australia. Is that an acceptable situation for Australian authorities? Should we not levy exactly the same restrictions on Chinese investment in Australia that the Beijing presidium places on Australian investment in China? Is that not a fair go? My understanding is that—and the inquiry will look at this—were the tables reversed and were Chinalco an Australian private company and Rio Tinto a Chinese based mining conglomerate with massive Chinese resources, there would be no way that this investment could take place.

It is a very complicated matter; it is correct that it go to a committee for inquiry. Despite my disappointment with the vote yesterday, I commend Senator Joyce on bringing forward this motion. I presume the Labor Party is also going to endorse it. It is a very important inquiry and it is one that the government can well do with. It has a very crucial decision to make here about this potential investment in Rio Tinto and it needs to be very, very aware of the ramifications of that. Maybe it can be summed up by reading from comments by Rowan Callick, the Asia-Pacific editor at the Australian. He had this to say in the Australian’s News.com:

It is about the sensitive point of contact between ownership by a socialist market economy corporate state, and by a private corporation in a liberal democracy.

Question agreed to.