Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, that case resolved in favour of Australia. It was only because the tribunal ruled that it had no jurisdiction to hear the case. And a huge amount of money was spent fighting that. The tribunal didn't say, 'No, the corporation hasn't got the right to do that.' No. It ruled that it had no jurisdiction to hear the case, not that the corporation was told that it didn't have the right to do it.

So, that was the Australian example, but there are so many other examples, and I know that my colleagues have already been through many of them tonight. But it's worth going through some of them. In 2016 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed an ISDS dispute against the Colombian government over the government's plans to reduce prices on a patented treatment for leukaemia. Then there are the examples of 2017, where the Canadian Bear Creek Mining Company was awarded $26 million from the Peruvian government because it cancelled a mining licence when it realised that the company had failed to obtain informed consent from Indigenous landowners. So it followed through on its requirements to get that consent and to make good, quality decisions in the interests of the Peruvian people, and they were sued by a Canadian company to the tune of $26 million. And they had to fight that case as well. They had to spend millions of dollars to fight that case in the international courts. And we know there was a case in 2015 where a US company won millions because its application for a quarry development was refused for environmental reasons. It won millions of dollars because those environmental controls and that legislation went against the interests of that multinational corporation.

That's the problem with ISDS provisions, which is why they are extremely controversial and why the European Court of Justice made decisions in 2017 and 2018 finding that ISDS was fundamentally incompatible with national sovereignty. Consequently, in any trade deals that the European Union are making, they are not proposing any form of ISDS. We know that New Zealand doesn't support ISDS provisions in its trade deals, and Australia should not support those provisions. We've got the Labor Party saying, 'We don't support them either, and we're going to negotiate after we've signed the deal to get rid of them.' Come on! They're in cloud-cuckoo-land. They are not going to be able to do that. If the Labor Party are serious about not wanting ISDS provisions in the TPP, then they have to vote against this legislation. Otherwise they are trying to fool the Australian public and pull the wool over their eyes.

We know that you don't even have to go down the track of actually being taken to court. Just having the ISDS provisions hanging over the heads of governments—including Australian governments—creates that regulatory chill. It causes governments to delay or reconsider regulations and legislation, particularly environmental legislation, labour legislation, and health and safety regulations. It actually makes governments step back and say, 'Oh, I don't think we can change that because we might be sued under ISDS provisions.' Think about some of the legislation that needs to be changed in Australia, and the fact that having ISDS provisions would put us at risk of being sued. Think about the huge issue of the climate emergency that we are facing, in relation to which the IPCC said last week we need to take drastic action: that we need to reduce our carbon emissions to keep the planet to only half a degree warmer than it is now, and that we need to have drastic controls to rapidly get out of fossil fuels and rapidly increase the use of renewable energy. But, if we were to take the type of actions that are required, such as a price on carbon, an export tariff on coal, extra provisions to support the rapid take-up of 100 per cent renewable energy or an expansion of the Renewable Energy Target—the whole suite of policy measures that the Greens support that are going to be needed for Australia to play its role in reaching a zero-carbon economy—all of those actions would put us in the position of potentially being sued for changing our legislation.

If we think about our mining industry, we know that there is huge domination by multinational corporations of our mining activities in Australia. The Senate environment committee is about to report on our inquiry into rehabilitation of mining sites. I won't pre-empt what our report says before we table it this Wednesday, but I can tell you that it recommends some changes to the way mining operations happen in Australia. We need to have more controls. We need to make sure that mining companies are much better regulated, so we don't end up with the huge legacy problems of environmental disasters from abandoned mine sites, such as have occurred in the past.

These measures that legislation could put in place, following the recommendations of our Senate committee, are just the sort about which international mining companies, just like that Peruvian mining company, could say: 'Oh, no, we don't like the fact you're doing that. You are making life that much harder for us. You are going to be reducing our profits because we are going to have to spend more money in order to put more environmental controls into place.' We know that we would be opening ourselves up to extra litigation and to being sued. This is the fundamental and really dangerous road that we are going down by signing off on this Trans-Pacific Partnership with these ISDS provisions.

The second area of work is the fact that this legislation that we are being asked to support doesn't include provisions for any labour market testing and that the TPP-11 commits Australia to accepting unlimited numbers of temporary workers from Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico and Vietnam. Again, although the Labor Party might say, 'We'll change that afterwards,' they will not be able to. They are kidding themselves and the Australian people if they think they're going to be able to change and renegotiate this after it's signed. These workers will be spread across a wide range of professional, technical and skilled trades occupations. The agreement does not require that there be any labour market testing to establish whether there are local workers available first. It will weaken our domestic labour market and exploit temporary workers at the same time. We know the problems with having a lot of temporary workers coming in and being tied to one employer. I was on the Senate inquiry that looked at temporary work visas. We know that it opens things up for exploitation of those very workers as well as denying Australian workers jobs. Those migrant workers remain tied to one employer for the course of their time in Australia and they face deportation if they lose their job for any reason.

Again, we are not against having migrants coming to this country and migrants working in this country, but there needs to be controls over it. We do not need to have a situation where there are unlimited numbers of temporary workers who would be available and able to come to Australia to fill these jobs without any labour market testing first. The Fair Work Ombudsman reported that temporary visa holders accounted for one in 10 complaints to the agency in 2015. These risks of exploitation are not hypothetical; they are happening right now. If, by signing this agreement, we open the door to vastly more numbers of temporary workers, that exploitation is going to continue to occur because it's structural. Where you have a temporary worker coming in and being tied to one employer, that employer has incredible power over that worker. That employer can say: 'You've got to do that, even though you think it's unsafe. You are going to work longer hours. You are going to be working in unsafe conditions.' If the worker dares to complain then he or she are out on their ear. The power imbalance means this is an inevitable aspect of having temporary workers coming in under these sorts of arrangements.

Finally, we have these huge problems, so why are we doing it? Supposedly it's because there will be huge economic benefits. I know my colleagues have gone through the complete lack of evidence as to what the economic benefits are going to be. If we sign up to this, after 15 years we're going to have an increase in our GDP of 0.6 per cent. That represents growth between zero and 0.1 per cent per year. That is absolutely less than a rounding error. It's somewhere between nothing and a rounding error. Then, as my colleague Senator Siewert has told us, the modelling shows job losses in Australia would total 39,000 after 10 years.

This is a shocking agreement. It's a shocking agreement that the government is putting up and it's shocking that the Labor Party are trying to ram it through as well. It's one of the most shocking agreements in a generation, and it's one so bad that there are many Labor MPs who think it's a terrible idea. It shows that the Labor Party, as well as the government, cannot be trusted to stay true to their values. The Labor Party say they will remain true to workers and then they sell them out to do a deal with the government over the TPP. The Labor Party say they care about the environment but then they refuse to condemn the climate bomb that's Adani. The Labor Party say they support refugees but then they are happy to keep on working with the government to lock children up in overseas detention. Right now, we have a situation where the big corporations are dominating and dictating to the government and also to the Labor Party what's happening. So, right now, the community needs more Greens in the Senate to keep both of these parties to account. We will not let the government and the Labor Party do what they want. (Time expired)