Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I see that once again we have a so-called free trade agreement in front of the Senate. Each time a free trade agreement is advanced we hear speeches extolling the virtues of free trade, telling us how much this will help everyday Australians. Free trade lowers tariff barriers, making it easier for our farmers to sell their produce—so we're told. We're told that so-called free trade gives market access for our manufactured goods, software and suchlike.

Australia has free trade agreements with New Zealand, Singapore, the United States, Thailand, Chile, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Peru, Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam, through the CPTPP, Brunei Darussalam and Cambodia, through the RCEP, and now India and the UK. After all these free trade agreements bringing all this increased prosperity, Australia should be rolling in it. But, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics measure of household income and wealth, since 2010 everyday Australian households have seen a reduction—not an increase—in their annual income of 1.2 per cent. This is not serving Australia. Everyday Australian households have seen a reduction in their wealth of 1.6 per cent. Australia is not rolling in new-found wealth; Australia has gone backwards, and Australians are going backwards. This is not serving Australia.

It should be remembered that in this period our mineral exports have absolutely boomed. From that alone, every Australian should be thousands of dollars better off. But we're not. So what's gone wrong? It's simple: nations do not sign free trade agreements unless they consider they will gain more than they lose. Of course, that is not possible. A pie can only be sliced in so many ways. There's no evidence free trade agreements will grow the pie so that each slice of the pie is larger. While growing the pie is the promise, the outcome is smaller slices of the same sized pie.

This so-called free trade agreement, like the previous agreements, will not make our lives better. It will not serve Australians. It will make it easier for large corporations to move capital around the world, chasing the lowest wage, the most flexible labour arrangements, including labour hire contracts that One Nation is still waiting for Labor to do something about. After we dragged their attention to it for the last three years, they still won't touch it. International capital will move money around, chasing the lowest tax rates and the highest profits.

This is where some of the negative outcomes from these so-called free trade agreements lie. Free trade agreements are a race to the bottom—a race to the lowest wages, the lowest taxation, the least corporate regulation and the most efficient enterprise. When proponents of free trade agreements talk about business efficiency, they never mean small and medium businesses or family businesses. Efficiency is a code word for large corporations becoming larger and sending small businesses broke to eliminate competition. That is not serving the people of Australia. That is not serving Australia

One Nation supports fair trade, not so-called free trade. Fair trade can occur between nations with similar wages and environmental regulations. These are the two big costs that decide how fairly one country can compete with another. The Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement is more likely to provide a fair outcome for Australia than any other of these so-called agreements with countries, like China, that treat environmental legislation as a joke and pay their workers unfairly low wages. The fact that a party called the Labor Party promotes these agreements belies their name. Their new iteration is the party of global capital and environmental rent-seekers. One Nation is now the party of the workers, because we serve the people. We have one flag, we have one community and we are One Nation, serving the people of Australia.