Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Five times—you're absolutely right, Minister. They have been used five times, including by OceanaGold, a WA based mining company, to take the El Salvadorian government to a tribunal process for no less than the entire budget of El Salvador for one year. It was a case which commenced in 2009, ceased in 2016 and was chucked out. The crime of the El Salvadorian government for which they were taken to a tribunal under this process was simply asking a mining corporation to clean up after themselves. I will make it very clear to the chamber that our opposition to these clauses and their use absolutely stands in relation to the use of them by Australian corporations to bully sovereign nations into allowing those corporations to pollute their lands.

In relation to the commentary made by the Labor Party, through Senator Gallagher, I'll make this very simple point, which should be clear to any of those who followed the JSCOT process closely: we are dealing with the implementing legislation for three separate free trade agreements here. There may well be so-called revamped ISDS clauses used in relation to the Hong Kong free trade agreement, flawed as they are. However, that is not the case in relation to the Peruvian and Indonesia free trade agreements. I would specifically point out that there exists in neither of those agreements specific carve-outs in relation to tobacco. They do not exist in the Indonesian or Peruvian free trade agreements, which is why civil society is concerned by the prospect of us entering into an agreement with a country that plays host to large tobacco corporations, who are ready, willing and waiting to re-litigate, potentially, the plain packaging debate that we've had in this country, as is absolutely open to them to do under ISDS processes.

Again, in case you haven't been paying attention, precedence does not operate in ISDS tribunals. They sit outside usual procedural justice norms here in Australia, so cases may be litigated and re-litigated under these processes. There is an additional concern that tobacco may well use these clauses with Indonesia to fight any potential future vaping legislation that may be put forward by this place or another. There can be no doubt that these clauses present an unacceptable risk to Australia's sovereignty and the ability to legislate in the public interest. That is why I would remind the Labor Party that the ACTU oppose these deals. The Electrical Trades Union opposes these deals so stringently, in fact, that they have said that they are going to have nothing more to do with you.

We are simply asking you folks to stick to the manifesto under which you went to the election. We are simply asking you to stand by the platform that you apparently spent three or four years formulating. It's not a large ask. It's just a tiny piece of opposition that is being asked from the Labor Party today. I would again urge them to reconsider their position on this particular amendment.