Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. When the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, went to Bangkok earlier this month for the East Asia Summit, he came bearing gifts for the Thai Prime Minister. It wasn't a stuffed koala or a bottle of Grange; it was a gift of jobs, but not to Australian citizens. The Prime Minister brought with him the pledge to expand the number of places for Thai citizens under Australia's working holiday visa program from 500 to 2,000. This doesn't sound like a big number in the context of the whole working holiday visa program, which currently allows many thousands of people from countries around the world to come to Australia every year and work. It certainly is small when you contemplate the 900,000 or 1.4 million people—depending on how you calculate—who are here in Australia on all types of temporary visas with working rights. But I raise this story to highlight how temporary work visas are expanded in this country and how we are increasingly embedding more rights for temporary workers in trade agreements, which by their very nature cannot be vetted by the parliament.

In the United States, the elected representatives in congress get to debate trade agreements and enshrine conditions, including labour rights, and environmental and other protections to ensure that their local workforce is not made worse off by the deal. In the European Union, trade deals are negotiated far more openly, with stakeholders consulted and engaged, and governments held more accountable for deals they sign. In Australia, the trade negotiations are a black box. We don't see the details until the deal is done. The parliament, if it's lucky, gets an up or down vote on some enabling legislation, not the substance of the trade agreements. In fact, it is the case that Australia's civil society—unions, churches, public health advocates and environmental activists—often have to rely on information from other countries that is in the public domain to find out what is being negotiated in our own country for our own citizens.

There is no doubt that the Australian people as a whole benefit enormously from the trade we conduct with countries in our region and beyond, and we should never apologise for asking the tough questions about the detail of the trade agreements that we sign up to on behalf of the Australian people. I believe that the Australian people want a more transparent system of trade negotiations. I believe that more sunshine will allow us to make better deals and to enhance the confidence that all Australians have in our trade system. I know that at a time when our youth unemployment is above 11.5 per cent, and above 20 per cent in some regional areas, there's a real concern about the way this government is adding to an already large and often exploited pool of temporary workers.

I say all this at a time that I acknowledge that Australia has an incredibly successful and open trading economy, and our standard of living in large measure comes from the trade generated from our mining, education, agriculture, tourism and manufacturing industries, as well as the professional and other services we sell overseas. These industries support workers and their families both directly and indirectly. Australia's commitment to our open trading system has also delivered benefits to ordinary Australians via the lower prices paid for clothing, furniture, building materials, appliances, cars and other imported goods. As well as growing jobs and lowering prices in our economy, there are also important strategic benefits. But we must not allow our trade agreements to dilute the rights and job opportunities of the Australian people.

Today the Senate is considering enabling legislation for these trade agreements. Labor is supporting the passage of this enabling legislation—the Customs Amendment (Growing Australian Export Opportunities Across the Asia-Pacific) Bill 2019 and Customs Tariff Amendment (Growing Australian Export Opportunities Across the Asia-Pacific) Bill 2019. We do it whilst making it very clear that, if we'd been in government, the trade agreements this legislation enables would look very different, and we do so having asked for a series of amendments that we think do the minimum to make these agreements at least somewhat improved.

As is the case with all trade agreements negotiated by Australia with other countries, the potential upsides and downsides of these deals never get the real consent of the Australian people via their representatives in parliament. They are never ventilated in public until after their secret negotiations are concluded. As well as being negotiated in secret, these trade agreements are never subjected to economic testing to judge the full impact on our labour market and wider economy. It is scandalously easy for the government to just assert that there will be jobs created, without any independent analysis on the real cost as well as benefits. Even the Productivity Commission has advised that trade deals that Australia is negotiating should be subject to higher scrutiny. The government, however, has chosen to present them as a job lot to be voted up or down. If trade agreements are worth signing, they are worth the proper attention of our legislature.

I want to highlight just a few of the issues raised by these deals which I believe should be subject to more scrutiny and debate. I do this because there are more trade deals on the horizon, and these deserve proper scrutiny by the public and their elected representatives. Take the trade deal agreement with Hong Kong. Australia and Australians are heavily invested in the success of Hong Kong both as an important economy and in terms of its status as a unique democracy under the 'one country, two systems' status. Some half a million Australians live and work there. It's currently facing the most important test of its democratic and independent legal institutions since its handover to China from British rule in 1997. Pro-democracy activists have recently told Australian lawmakers that they have called on us to hold off on ratifying this deal until the authorities agree to an independent investigation into the actions of the police during ongoing demonstrations. The bipartisan Joint Standing Committee on Treaties considered the Hong Kong agreement, as it did the other two, but this committee will always ultimately have a majority of government members and, therefore, is not more than just an opportunity to review and air concerns.

Let's take the trade agreement with Indonesia. This undoubtedly has important strategic benefits for Australia. Indonesia is a rising regional power and is a critically important neighbour. The agreement also has important economic benefits. Under the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, signed in March this year, the Australian steel industry may be able to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of steel into the Indonesian market, which may create jobs in our steel industry as Indonesia steps up its ambitious public works program, including building its new capital city.

But as legislators it is our duty to not just look at the potential benefits of any trade deal but also look at the potential detriments. There remain some real concerns in the Labor caucus about some of the provisions in this agreement, particularly those related to the increased number of temporary workers that will be added to the growing pool of over 900,000 to 1.4 million workers, depending on how you measure it. The Indonesian trade deal alone will allow for 4,100 more working holiday visas once the agreement comes into effect until the cap rises to 5,000 a year in the sixth year of this agreement.

The findings of the Migrant Workers' Taskforce, released earlier this year, found that as many as half of the migrant workers employed in Australia were being underpaid. The exploitation sees these workers being systematically paid under the legal minimum, as well as being forced to overpay their employers for accommodation or other expenses. Language barriers, a lack of education about their working rights in Australia, the lack of union right of entry and the right to inspect the books of those companies engaging these exploited workers, the fear of speaking out against employers who will sponsor their visas and the fear of being deported are among the reasons that wage theft and other forms of exploitation of migrant workers go unreported and are never prosecuted. Employers who are caught out underpaying their workers often try to pay off some workers quietly, with the hope they will be grateful for the money they get before they return home. The degree of exploitation is substantial.

We also know that we have a growing underclass of vulnerable workers, with little policing of wage theft and illegal working conditions. We are systematically undermining the pay and working conditions of the wider workforce. The government is dragging its heels on the 22 recommendations addressing the exploitation of workers that arose from the Migrant Workers' Taskforce. At the same time, it is happy to bring more temporary workers into Australia to add to this group of the potentially exploited.

Because of the concerns about some of the provisions of these trade agreements and the way in which they have been negotiated, Labor asked the government to make a series of guarantees to improve them. The government has agreed to these, and we intend to hold them to these promises. We asked for additional measures designed to ensure that holders of working holiday visas are not exploited. We have also asked, and they have agreed, to make sure that these workers are, in fact, qualified for the work they are performing in Australia. We have also asked, and the government has agreed, to make changes to the flawed investor-state dispute settlement mechanism that is in the Indonesia agreement. The government has also agreed to terminate the old 1993 bilateral investment treaty with Indonesia, which contained an investor-state dispute settlement—ISDS—mechanism that allows global corporations to sue governments over laws to protect public health, the rights of Indigenous people and labour and environmental rights. There will be an ISDS mechanism in this new agreement, with some carve-out for public health. It is better than the old ISDS, but there are still concerns about the power this gives to unelected global companies. It is an improvement that the government has also agreed to improve the new investor-state dispute settlement mechanism after five years. We have also asked them, and they have agreed, to ensure there is nothing in this agreement that would require the privatisation of government services, nor any provisions that would put any limits on any future decisions to acquire public assets.

Finally, the government has agreed that the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties conduct an inquiry into all aspects of Australia's treaty-making process with the aim of improving transparency, in consultation with the wider public. I welcome this initiative but I say again: this is not a substitute for a real debate about the merits of treaties. Our system currently excludes this, and trade agreements remain, effectively, in the gift of the executive in Australia. For this reason, the promises extracted from the government about how these trade agreements will be improved and implemented are just that—promises. They are not written into the trade agreements, because the agreements have already been signed. Such is the 'black box' system of treaty making that we have in Australia.

I'm not saying the government is inherently untrustworthy on these particular promises. I welcome the fact that they have recognised that some of the aspects of these treaties are potentially—and are—deeply unpopular with hardworking Australians, who are facing flattening wages, cuts to penalty rates and no sign of wage growth on the horizon. I do, however, make this important point. Our policy is critical, as trade and visa rights are given as part of these agreements. The only way for elected representatives and the public as a whole to have their concerns addressed is for promises to be backed up, not as an afterthought. Of course, we are currently replaying the black box of trade negotiations with the ongoing deliberations around the RCEP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. India has not agreed to sign up, but 15 countries have—China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and 10 ASEAN countries. But, as with these trade agreements, this parliament will be once again presented with an up or down vote on the RCEP, with very little room to consult with those affected or to scrutinise the agreement and make it better for ordinary working Australians.

We are a nation built on the notion of fairness, but we cannot have fairness when the deliberations about important international agreements are so opaque and the ability to reform them is so limited. If we maintain support for open trading systems, then we have to make sure that agreements like these get some sunlight and debate. They need to come out of the black box.