Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to make a brief contribution to this debate in the committee stage. I understand that Senator Roberts and One Nation are very new to this trade debate. Senator Carr gave a very considered overview yesterday of his many years in this chamber and as a minister working in the trade area. I'd like to point out that the Greens too are very aware that the fundamental principle at stake here is one of executive power—more executive power—being wrestled off parliament, of more decisions being outsourced to the bureaucracy. The Greens, back in 2014-15, initiated an inquiry into our treaty-making process. We believe that the trade- and treaty-making process in this place is broken and needs to be revisited. We had a very interesting and long Senate inquiry into that. I then introduced a private member's bill into this place, to reform the trade treaty process.

Parliament has always been aware that the executive holds the power in trade negotiations. This is a hangover of the old Westminster system. It goes back hundreds of years, to when governments negotiated treaties, to when the British Empire conquered countries and negotiated treaties. It really hasn't changed that much. What the government did back in the seventies and eighties, when debate started on this, was to introduce the JSCOT process. I've sat on JSCOT for many years, as have my colleagues. What Senator Roberts doesn't understand is that it is a government dominated committee and a rubber stamp process. The trade negotiations that set the rules and regulations that go into the treaties that we ratify in parliament—and I underline that word 'ratify'—are done in secret. Essentially, DFAT, in the process of trade negotiations, is a black box. Having sat for many years with my colleagues, trying to ask questions about decisions around, for example, the TPP, I can tell Senator Roberts and One Nation that we have virtually no say in what goes into these trade agreements.

If you listen to the senators across the chamber, you might think this is about farmers exporting more products. Trade is about that, but these trade treaty processes have been almost completely overwhelmed by trade in services and a whole range of other exports and imports. The kinds of trade treaty processes we are negotiating in this day and age are extremely complex and ubiquitous across every aspect of our life in this country. They affect everything we do—everything—and yet this parliament only gets to ratify them. If you want to change a trade treaty process and you raise those issues in JSCOT, they will be rejected, because it's a government run committee. If you come in here and ask to amend a trade treaty process, you can't, even if they're entirely sensible amendments, because those decisions have been made by bureaucrats and stamped by the executive. Before it even comes to parliament and to JSCOT, it's already been signed; I bet Senator Roberts didn't know that. These things have already been signed before they even come to us. You can reject it and vote against it—as, I'm very proud to say, the Greens have done on a number of trade deals—but you cannot change it. Our preference would be to amend them and change them, but that option is not available to us as parliamentarians.

The last thing we should be doing is giving more power to the executive and to bureaucrats, and removing our role of oversight in this chamber as senators. It's almost like there is a parallel economic system and governance system in this country and around the world in the context of globalisation—that is, through the trade and treaty process where executives of countries negotiate this. May I say: the people who actually do know what's going on in these very complex trade and treaty processes are mostly big pharmaceutical companies and big corporations. Civil society, including the unions, might get invited to a couple of shallow presentations and given some detail, but they're not invited into the trade and treaty process. I would urge One Nation to reject this bill and, more importantly, fundamentally reject the principle of giving more power to the executive and removing the power that we have as senators of oversight of these critically important matters.