Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Patrick, thank you very much for those questions. I will answer them in two parts. First of all I'll go through the reasons why the government doesn't support the amendments, and then I'll clarify what this bill is about and what it's not about, because there are some things that the government doesn't agree will impact in some of those areas.

First of all, we don't support the proposed amendments because we believe that they would render the bill ineffective. They would break the mechanism incorporating the PSR changes by reference to the updated annex of the relevant FTAs. The intent of the bill is to enable the Customs Act to automatically incorporate periodic PSR updates by referring to the agreed updated PSR schedule in the relevant free trade agreement, rather than requiring a duplicative regulatory amendment to that to accomplish this. The proposed amendments would require those duplicative regulations to still be produced for these last six FTA agreements that are under consideration here today. We also think that the proposed amendments would also defeat the intent of aligning Australia's FTA practice for all of our FTAs. One of the key principles of this is to make sure that all of our 15 FTAs are fully aligned in terms of process. That is currently not the case; we've done nine of them this way and we now want to bring the remaining six into the same framework. Specifically, the bill seeks to align, as I said, these six FTAs. We believe continuing to use the old practice, which still applies to these particular six FTAs, is burdensome and also unnecessary. It's very difficult for traders and for industry to have two different processes in place. I would point out that the Australian parliament has already approved the automatic incorporation practice for nine of Australia's 15 FTAs and in 2018 the parliament passed, with opposition support at the time, as we discussed at some length yesterday, the amendment to the Customs Amendment (Product Specific Rule Modernisation) Act. The 2018 act has the identical impact of this bill; there is no difference, because we're seeking to align and harmonise all of these FTAs.

All other FTAs that have been implemented since 2017 have also included this automatic referral mechanism. So this is the third time that this mechanism has now come to this place. Again, as I said, it's all about harmonising and having all of our FTAs under the same rules. A practical consequence of failing to bring the last six FTAs into alignment with our broader practice is that not only will it create that additional regulatory burden that we don't have for the nine FTAs who have this provision but also it will be incredibly challenging for traders who are trading across many of these FTAs. So, in answer to that first part of your question, that is the reason why we are doing this: to bring them all into alignment in a way that we have already done twice in this place—in exactly the identical way.

You referred to some of our colleagues' comments and contributions yesterday. I will just address a couple of what I'll politely call myths that were brought into the debate. This bill does not introduce a new process to deal with these FTA amendments. It is exactly what we've done twice before. It does not affect JSCOT and the parliament's ability to scrutinise. It does not introduce any new procedures. When the World Customs Organization makes these changes every five years for harmonisation, the process for us to work through the FTA agreements and take any of those amendments through JSCOT is exactly the same; there is no change to that. Yesterday one of our colleagues referred to this bill as somehow relating to antidumping. This is not an antidumping measure and doesn't impact any of our antidumping measures.

So, what is it? It's the same as the identical bill in 2018 for our FTAs with China, Japan, ASEAN, New Zealand and Singapore. It basically streamlines our arrangements with Thailand, Malaysia, the United States, the Republic of Korea, China and New Zealand to align with those other nine so that they are all treated the same. And it also reduces, of these agreements, 3,000 pages to 80 pages, which makes them simpler and cleaner to administer and also to understand. Again, as I said yesterday, this exact same measure was endorsed as uncontroversial and administrative in nature, as Senator Carr said two years ago. In fact, he stated on this exact same bill two years ago that this was simple and administrative. Yesterday he said that the facts have changed. Well, the government would state very strongly that these are exactly identical circumstances.