Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson, I'll try to spell it out even more simply than I did in the previous answer. If Australian governments undertake actions that would, in most cases, be a breach of our constitutional principles or our laws of the land and that in some way damage, in a retrospective sense, the investments of investors, governments are held to account for that.

Overwhelmingly that happens through our domestic legal processes. If you go and seize the assets of a company unfairly, they'll sue you in a court of law, because Australia's court system and legal frameworks recognise and respect that already, but the ISDS would provide an additional fallback, potentially, for investors in Australia. The reasons that the ISDS has never been used successfully are twofold. First, Australian governments don't tend to behave in that way. Second, if they did, our domestic legal procedures already provide probably better, easier and more secure avenues for investors to take action against governments that behave in such ways against basic principles.

Senator Hanson, you asked the question: why would we include such provisions? It is to protect Australian companies operating in other markets, to protect Australian businesses who think: 'You know what? I can do better than just doing business in Australia; I can also grow my business by operating in other countries, in other investment scenarios.' And we ought to back those businesses. We can be a tiny, shallow, little, inward-looking country if you like and not actually encourage our businesses to look outwards or we can be a nation that encourages Australian businesses to seize investment opportunities to go and work in other nations, and these provisions provide some protection over and above the domestic legal frameworks of those countries. We support them because, on balance, they are proven, over time, to give greater protection to Australian businesses operating in more uncertain legal environments than they give to foreign investors operating in Australia's well-established and quite certain and secure legal environment.