Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There is no way that Australia should be signing this—absolutely no way. I was a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties when we had the hearings on this. It was pretty clear that signing RCEP basically achieves nothing for us in terms of trade. No.1, they won't actually release any independent modelling that shows the details. But, basically, on the evidence presented to us, there were no claims that it would see a massive improvement in our trade. There was no modelling presented to say, 'Yes, this is going to be really good for Australia.' Basically, in terms of our relationships and trade relationships with the countries that were part of RCEP, it was all going to stay much the same. So, No. 1, the benefits are basically zero.

Then you've got to look at the costs, and the costs of signing RCEP are immense, because basically it means that Australia is signing up to trade arrangements that are unfair, that are environmentally really damaging and that have no labour rights provisions or human rights provisions. It is basically an incredibly old-fashioned last-century way of doing trade that does not even stand up for the standards in most trade agreements that are now being negotiated around the world.

I want to talk about four things that are fundamental problems with RCEP and reasons why Australia should be saying: 'No. Come on. Yes, fair trade's good, and we're happy to enter into fair trade agreements, but RCEP is not that.' The first is the total lack of transparency in the negotiations and in the whole process, basically. The second is the lack of human rights standards. The third is the lack of labour rights standards. The fourth is particularly important this week, the last week that we are in this parliament before our Prime Minister goes off to Glasgow, before this immense time of the world coming together to tackle our climate crisis. Yet here we are, signing up to a trade agreement that has no environmental standards. It hasn't even got an environmental chapter. It basically says climate doesn't matter.

First of all, I will talk about the lack of transparency in the negotiations and in the whole process. I think the easiest way to summarise that is to read from the submission that AFTINET, the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, made to the inquiry into RCEP. They said:

Australia's current procedure for negotiating and ratifying trade agreements is highly secretive and is not compliant with the basic democratic principles that underpin our domestic policy-making processes. Trade negotiations are conducted in secret and neither the Parliament nor the wider public had input into, or oversight over, the development of Australia's negotiation mandates. This was the case with the RCEP negotiations.

Negotiation texts were secret throughout the negotiations and the final text of the agreements was not made public until after the government made the decision to sign the agreement.

That in itself is a reason why we should be saying no. We should be renegotiating our entire trade negotiation practices so they do not conflict with basic democratic engagement in these processes, and you can do it. Other countries in the world have processes that allow for much more input from civil society and from their parliaments before the agreements are signed. So it's not as if we would be out on our own in insisting that this be the case.

The second area, as others have already noted in this debate—interestingly, although the Labor Party note this, it doesn't seem to influence how they vote—is the lack of labour rights standards. Again, they are not there. AFTINET say:

… trade agreements should include commitments by governments not to reduce labour rights, and to implement internationally-agreed labour rights which are defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). These should be enforced by the state-to-state disputes process of the agreement. These rights intersect with UN human rights obligations and include freedom of association, rights to collective bargaining, health and safety in the workplace, no forced labour, no child labour and no discrimination in the workplace …

Again, this is what trade agreements should include. RCEP does not. Why should we sign an agreement that does not include standards that are recognised as what should be in trade agreements?

The third area that I want to get to as the lack of human rights standards. I am absolutely stunned that we are signing a trade agreement with countries including Myanmar, China and the Philippines. And why? It achieves no increase in our trade. We are signing a trade agreement with Myanmar, at the same time as countries around the world are trying to work out what is the most pressure that they can put on the junta that took over Myanmar, in a brutal attack on people, democracy and human rights that has killed over a thousand people. There are people who are fleeing the Myanmar military forces. We know that the pressure is on—not that Australia has done anything about it—to apply sanctions. The EU, Canada, the US and the UK have all applied sanctions. We at least have said that we're not going to continue any military cooperation. We need to be having economic sanctions. All of this is necessary to try and do something about this brutal attack on democracy in Myanmar. That's what Australia should be doing in relation to Myanmar. But, no, we are signing a trade agreement with them. Why on earth would we sign a trade agreement with them? It can only be taken as us being complicit, as us giving tacit support to the Myanmar military's takeover and the junta in Myanmar. That in itself should be reason enough to say we're going to put this on hold, we're not signing a trade agreement with Myanmar as part of it. It is just something that is unacceptable for Australia to do.

We've got a free-trade agreement with China that they are blatantly breaching. There are bans on our goods going into China because they are unhappy with us because we are speaking out about some of their human rights abuses and their expansionism. So they've decided to block our exports into China. Given that behaviour by China at the moment, given that is so live, given that the Australia-China relationship is at such a low ebb at the moment, there are many other things that we should be doing with China to work out how we improve that relationship. But blatantly signing a trade agreement that doesn't require any of that negotiation is just ridiculous.

Thirdly, there are other countries—and I've been hearing speeches about this today: essentially, we're signing this trade agreement because ASEAN nations are the main nations that are involved; we want to keep sweet with ASEAN and it would be a snub to them if we didn't. We need to work out how to work with ASEAN without supporting brutal military totalitarian governments. Frankly, we are maintaining nice polite relationships with brutal totalitarian governments that are destroying the life of their citizens. We have heard so much on this in the parliament over the years—me in particular in my role as foreign affairs spokesperson over the last year. Frankly, we should not be kowtowing to them and basically saying, 'Okay, we'll sign trade agreements.' Yes, we need to work out how to work multilaterally, how we can work together where we have common interests; but signing free-trade agreements that do not require anything from them in terms of human right in particular, as well as labour rights and environmental rights, is not the way to go.

Fourthly, there is the lack of environmental rights standards. The other three areas I've talked about are pretty amazing and astounding, but the lack of environmental rights standards in the RCEP trade negotiations are just gobsmacking. We are in a climate crisis. We are in a time in humanity—possibly this year and certainly this decade—in terms of the future of humanity on this planet, where the climate crisis is the No. 1 thing that we need to tackle. Yet we are signing a trade agreement that doesn't even have an environmental chapter in it. It doesn't have any constraints in it, any measures in it, to require governments to take climate seriously and for that to impact on our trade relationships.

Of course, other countries in the world are very much linking climate and trade. It's quite right that they should do that. It is not just for a moral reason that we should only be trading with countries that are tackling the climate crisis appropriately, given it is a shared issue for all of us; it is also an economic issue. That's what the European Union are realising: if they are taking action to slash their carbon pollution by more than 50 per cent by 2030, why should other countries freeload on that? There will be costs, over the coming years, in making those huge cuts in our carbon pollution. The benefits are, of course, immense—it means humanity will actually have a future—but there are costs. So why shouldn't the European Union, which is taking those actions, say to other countries, 'If you're not taking those costs into account, if you're just letting polluters pollute for free, we're going to put some tariffs on you to account for that'?

We had our trade minister, just yesterday, noting that Australia is likely to be liable for carbon tariffs for goods that we try to export into the EU. And it is very appropriate that we should be. What that means is that, instead of having a price on carbon here in Australia that we could be reaping the benefits of, with the revenue raised supporting the transition to a zero carbon economy here in Australia, supporting programs for jobs for workers who need to transition out of the mining of coal, gas and oil—instead of that revenue being able to be allocated to that, it's going to go off to the European Union so that they can use it.

Basically these things are linked. We are in a climate crisis. There is action that needs to be taken. Multitudes of international mechanisms all around the world are being developed to work out how we can work together as a world to tackle climate. The COP26 conference in Glasgow that starts in 10 days time is obviously one of the prime mechanisms to get countries to up the level of their national contributions to slash our carbon pollution. Here we have a government that's doing nothing. It's going off to Glasgow with a completely empty basket. We're offering nothing in terms of increasing our ambition to tackle the climate crisis. At the same time, we are signing a trade agreement that says zero about carbon, zero about climate. It is just unthinkable. It shows that we have got it completely upside down when it comes to how we think about what it means to be a good global citizen, what it means to act in the global interest, what it means to act in our national interest. All of those three things are the same.

At the front and centre of everything we are doing we need to put human rights, labour rights, the extinction crisis, the huge pressures that the world's environment and biodiversity are under and the huge pressures that the world is under because of climate, because they are existential crises that the world is facing. With every global mechanism that we are part of, we should be saying, 'Is this going to help or is this going to hinder action on tackling the climate crisis?'

There are so many things we could be doing to help. We could be going to Glasgow and saying: 'Yes, Australia is going to play its part. We are going to slash our pollution, as the science says should happen—by 75 per cent by 2030 at least, and to zero carbon as quickly as possible thereafter.' We could be doing that. We could be signing up to the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which has got 41 countries who are committing to get out of coal by 2030. We could be signing up to the Global Methane Alliance. We could be taking any number of actions internationally. But instead what are we doing? We are signing a free trade agreement that basically is blind to all of these issues that the world is facing. The Australian Greens support fair trade. We support having good relationships with our neighbours. But we don't support the sorts of arrangements that are in the RCEP and absolutely should not be supported.