Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the legislation before us today, the Customs Amendment (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership Implementation) Bill 2018 and the related bill. For decades, the problem in Australia has been that large corporations wield far too much power over our democracy and economy. We've been told that, if we deregulate, cut taxes for big business, privatise anything that's not nailed down and attack unions' rights to protect working conditions for working people, suddenly we'll all be better off, that wealth will trickle down magically to all of us. Neoliberalism, market rationalism, economic rationalism—call it what you like, the reality is that we were sold the lie that what is good for big business is going to automatically be good for ordinary people. It's a lie.

The myth is that simply handing over more power to big corporations, as this deal does, will benefit Australian communities, Australian workers, people living on the land, farmers, people in service industries, people who want to get access to affordable medicines and, indeed, our precious environment. If you believe that handing over more power to big corporations is the pathway to do that then you've been asleep for the last 30 years, because for 30 years what we've seen is the outsourcing of our democracy to big corporations, and the effect has been economic inequality, environmental destruction and a community that pits neighbour against neighbour. The reality is that this is a bad deal. It's a bad deal because it hands over extraordinary power to corporations and takes it off sovereign governments.

Let's look at some of the specific issues contained in this agreement and go through them one by one to see exactly what will happen if Australia signs on to this deal. Firstly, there are the investor-state dispute settlement provisions, the ISDS provisions. In short, what they do is to give the extraordinary power to corporations to sue governments if a government passes a law they don't like. If a government blocks a mining application, a multinational corporation can come along, sue it and have their dispute heard in private. A government could foot the bill for any potential lost revenue simply because a government has decided to protect a local community or, indeed, the environment. For laws strengthening air pollution protections, again, companies can come along and sue governments. Raising the minimum wage could be seen as contrary to the interests of some of the corporations involved in specific proposals.

We know that this is possible because it has happened before. Australia was sued by a tobacco company for bringing in plain packaging, for goodness sake. We were sued because we introduced a law to protect the public health of our community. This complaint was levelled against the Australian government and action was taken. Fortunately, we won that case. Had we lost, Australia's plain packaging rules would have had to be repealed. These ISDS provisions are so bad that even John Howard, through the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, refused to include them as part of that agreement. Here we are, a decade on, with a modern Liberal Party—hardly a surprise—backing in this change. It is also now being backed in by Bill Shorten and the Labor Party.

Moving beyond ISDS provisions, you've got the issue of labour market testing. That is there to demonstrate that, yes, if we can't find workers to do a particular role or task in Australia, we have the opportunity of bringing in people from overseas. But the TPP-11 commits Australia to accepting unlimited numbers of temporary workers from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam. They are going to be workers spread across a wide range of professional, technical and skilled trades and occupations. That's because the agreement does not require there to be any labour market testing of whether there are people here who can do those jobs. These are workers who will be brought into Australia to work in jobs and on projects where there could be Australians in regional communities who are ready and willing to do the same job on the same project.

We know that there is danger when those migrant temporary workers remain tied to one employer for the course of their time in Australia. If things go badly, they face deportation. They face deportation if they lose their job for any reason whatsoever. It's an agreement that creates less bargaining power for that group of workers. We know this because the Fair Work Ombudsman reported that temporary visa holders accounted for only one in 10 complaints to the agency in 2015. This is what you get when you sign up to trade agreements that have been written by corporations for corporations and not for the Australian community.

When it comes to medicines, the TPP-11's intellectual property chapter contain a series of rules that lock in strong monopolies for patents on medicines. That puts affordable medicines out of reach. It extends the patents for a number of medicines, keeping the price artificially high. It is the first official trade agreement involving Australia to propose an additional, longer monopoly on data protection for biologic medicines. These are medicines that have the capacity to revolutionise the way we deliver health care in this country. Instead of reform that is in the interests of patients, what we're seeing is reform that is in the interests of huge pharmaceutical companies. This creates a dangerous precedent that treats the lives of Australians as a second-order concern behind the profits of big pharma. That's why MSF, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders, described TPP-12 in these terms:

The TPP is a bad deal for medicine: it's bad for humanitarian medical treatment providers such as Medecins Sans Frontieres, and it's bad for people who need access to affordable medicines around the world …

Of course, what we do know is that, when it comes to the benefits of these trade agreements, they consistently overpromise and underdeliver. They assume we get none of the downsides and all of the upsides. They make heroic assumptions of full employment. They assume perfect labour mobility and assume away any income distribution effects or trade balance effects. The US Peterson Institute for International Economics produced a study of TPP-12, which included the United States, and it estimated a very small increase in Australia's GDP after 15 years. It's essentially a rounding error—0.6 per cent. That's 0.1 per cent each year. Of course, on the downside, we saw a separate study that found that job losses in Australia would total 39,000 jobs lost after 10 years. You see, they always overpromise and underdeliver.

In this case, the benefits are so small because Australia's got free trade agreements with a number of the TPP-12 countries already. You ask somebody who works in agriculture right now about the promises that have been made with some of the free trade agreements we've seen and how they were supposed to revolutionise the industry and bring in rivers of gold. Most farmers are still doing it tough. Those trade agreements haven't made any difference to their lives. The reality is this is a bad, bad deal. It hands over huge power to corporations through the ISDS provisions. It abolishes the need for labour market testing. It makes medicines more expensive. It ensures that, rather than benefiting from free and fair trade with our neighbours, we hand over extraordinary influence to corporations over democratically elected governments. Politics is pretty crook right now, but the one advantage you have in a democracy is that you can vote people out.

Labor are trying to tell us that they don't support many aspects of this deal and that they're going to try and change it once it's been signed. Just think about that. They're saying, 'We're going to sign a contract today and then we're going to attempt to change it if we win the next election.' They've cited evidence of these side letters signed with countries like New Zealand. Let's be really clear about this. These were agreements that were struck before the TPP was agreed to in law. If you're going to engage in side deals, it's an acknowledgement that the deal itself creates all sorts of problems for you, and you fix them now before you sign away any leverage by signing this contract into law. You can't walk away from the bits of the deal you don't like after you've signed the deal or after you've entered into a contract. The Labor Party is being dishonest with its members, it's being dishonest with Labor Party supporters, it's being dishonest with the unions and it's being dishonest with the Australian people when it says that it can sign this deal and then change it after it has been signed. These provisions will be locked into law and will be with us indefinitely.

We know that this is part of the Liberal Party DNA. We know that, when it comes to corporations, they are hand in glove with the big end of town. We know they don't give diddly squat about the needs of people in regional communities, ordinary workers and people doing it tough. So it's no surprise that the Liberal Party would sign this deal and would be welcoming the opportunity to work with the Labor Party on it. But it's remarkable that we are less than a year out from an election with the Labor Party prepared to do a deal on this with the Liberals to sell out workers and to give more power to corporations at a time when people are saying: 'No. We've had enough. We've had a gutful. We are sick of a politics where corporations wield so much influence over our democracy that it's only the money that talks and people are locked out.' That's what this deal represents.

Bill Shorten says to trust him, that he'll walk away from the TPP—the bits he doesn't like—when he wins government. When you're in opposition and you're not being forced to sign it, if you're not going to stand up for the bits you don't like in this deal now, which is when we have to abolish the ISDS provisions—when we have to make sure that medicines aren't put out of reach of ordinary people and when we have to make sure that ordinary workers are being looked after—how on earth can we trust you to do it in government?

I say to people right around the country: we have consistently expressed concerns about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Of course, we support trade that's fair. We understand that trade with our neighbours has the capacity to influence and benefit all of us but it's got to be fair trade. It has got to be trade that is in the interests of the Australian community; not trade that does the bidding of big corporations. How on earth can you accept a deal that says to sovereign governments: 'You pass a law to protect public health, you pass a law to protect our environment and if a corporation doesn't like it we're going to give them the opportunity to take us to court. And if they win we're going to have to pay them compensation.' That's what this deal does. Why on earth would the Labor Party be supporting that?

We've given up on the Liberals. We know they're a lost cause, but here is your opportunity to stand up for people and not for corporations. Your big test is here today and it looks like you're going to squib it. It's a disgrace.