Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Great. Now he is flashing me in the Senate!

This is an unusual public interest debate to have two days out from the end of parliament, but I think there are going to be important lessons from this debate for us for the new year, when we return. What has already been said, obviously, is that one of the consequences of a Donald Trump presidency is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is highly unlikely to go ahead. It is effectively dead, buried and cremated, as we say in Australia. It looks as though the TPP itself is not going to progress, but that does not mean we cannot have a broader discussion about the lessons from the TPP debate so far, about the opportunities and about how we need to craft trade deals moving forward.

If anything, the dangers of the TPP are a warning to us all about how we engage the public on free trade agreements if we want to maintain support for these agreements and if we want these agreements to be successful. Australia's response to the TPP also reflects what this government has been prepared to give—the removal of labour market and skills testing, the potential rise in cost of biologic medicine, the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement provisions, intellectual property clauses, and the lack of any independent assessment of the agreement.

Two of these concerns, the removal of labour market and skills testing as well as the investor state dispute settlement provisions, I think really warrant further investigation. For those who support trade and support the principle of trade, I think it is important to note that not all trade deals are good or bad because they are trade deals; it is the details of the deal that make it either good or bad. Trade deals should be assessed on their merits. Removing labour market testing fundamentally undermines things like the 457 visa program, which we have already spoken about today, and is at odds with community expectations. Insofar as that is concerned, the TPP would have undermined this fundamental right by allowing six countries to be exempt from labour market testing provisions. This would have been a fundamental shift which would have allowed jobs—such as those for mechanics, plumbers, electricians and nurses—to be filled by foreigners even if there were Australians willing to do the job.

Beyond that, I had very serious concerns about the power and the role of investor-state dispute settlement provisions as they were outlined in the draft TPP. The inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement provisions commonly known as ISDS was extremely concerning to the many Labor members on this side of the chamber but also, I know, to the broader community and to many other parliamentarians. Throughout the hearings that were done on this—if you go through the report, you will see the work that the committee did—there was not sufficient evidence that ISDS would benefit Australia. In fact, the evidence presented to the committee showed that it would put our nation's sovereignty and reasonable policymaking at risk.

The other 11 TPP nations moved to omit the United States from the agreement. So that it can be enacted, there would have to be a new agreement, and it would all have to be looked at again. But we need to look at these individual agreements based on their own merits, one at a time. So it seems highly unlikely that we are going to have a TPP agreement as was originally outlined. That is not to say that this government is not going to spend the next year working on future and further agreements, and different agreements.

I think in doing so it is very important that we understand that community expectations have to be brought into any action taken, and there cannot be a situation where there are winners and losers—where one group is discriminated against in a trade agreement that favours another group—and expect the community to support it and go along with it. But I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing. It is a wake-up call for politicians—that, when it comes to free trade agreements, some of them are good and some of them are bad, and that they are not inherently either.

I want to say—and I note my very good friend Senator Williams is in the chamber across from me—that there are 11 other members of the TPP, and that we will hopefully be working with these nations to develop our own free trade style agreements, and hopefully it can be a mass agreement which will be beneficial to Australia and to these nations. It may be done at a bilateral level or a multilateral level, and there may be different types of agreements. But, as we are coming to the end of the year, I think it is important to wish our many friends from across the world who are working with us on the TPP a very merry Christmas. I want to wish them a merry Christmas and a happy new year. If you can indulge me for a few moments, Mr Acting Deputy President Back, I intend to offend most of these nations now by saying 'Merry Christmas' to them in their own language in an incredibly botched manner!

To those from Malaysia and Brunei, I say 'slamat hari natal'. To the Vietnamese, I say 'chuc mung giang sinh'. To the Singaporeans and Chinese, I say 'sheng dan kwai loh'. To the Japanese, I say—this is how you say 'Merry Christmas' in Japan—'merii kurisumasu'. Frankly, I think they're not even trying!