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. Efficiency is a code word for large corporations becoming larger and sending small businesses broke. They do not benefit Australia.
Transcript
President 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 just how much this will help everyday Australians.
Free trade lowers tariff barriers, making it easier for our farmers to sell their produce, we are 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
- 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.
According to the ABS measure of Household Income and Wealth, since 2010 everyday Australian households have seen a reduction in their annual income of 1.2%.[1]
Not an increase, a reduction.
Everyday Australian households have also seen a reduction in their wealth of 1.6%.
Australia is not rolling in new found wealth.
Australia has gone backwards. And Australians are going backwards.
It should be remembered that in this period our minerals exports have boomed. From that alone, every Australian should be thousands of dollars better off.
So what’s going wrong?
It’s simple, nations do not sign free trade agreements unless they consider they will gain more than they lose.
That of course is not possible. A pie can only be sliced so many ways.
There’s no evidence free trade agreements will grow the pie so each slice is larger.
While growing the pie is the promise, the outcome is smaller slices of the same size pie.
This so-called free trade agreement, like the previous agreements, will not make our lives better.
It will make it easier for large corporations to move capital around 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.
International capital will move money around chasing the lowest tax rates and the highest profits.
This is where some of the negative outcomes 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 agreement talk about business efficiency they never mean small and medium businesses, family businesses.
Efficiency is a code word for large corporations becoming larger and sending small businesses broke.
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 UK free trade agreement is more likely to provide a fair outcome for Australia than any other of these agreements with countries like China, that treat environmental legislation as a joke and who pay their workers unfairly low wages.
The fact that a party called the Labor party promotes these agreements belies their new iteration as the party of global capital and environmental rent seekers. One Nation is now the party of workers.
[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/finance/household-income-and-wealth-australia/latest-release. Gini measure.
Hi Mal, I have seem most of these already – thankyou for your service. You and I seem to be on the same page. These trade deals a pure poison, just like the shots!
100% agreed, Senator Roberts
Few people are aware that Prof Paul Samuelson was one of the foremost worldwide advocates for Free Trade for about 50 years, then HE RECANTED ! His textbook has been used in probably half the Universities of the world in their Economics 101 subject for decades. To his credit, at the age of 90 he published a long learned article in an Economics Journal in year 2004. The article is full of equations and real-world data, and he reached the CONCLUSION that when one adds up all the negatives and the positives from Free Trade then you end up with a NET LOSS ! His article applies to the USA but I would expect similar conclusions from a similar analysis of the Australian economy. I am disgusted that so many in the economics profession, politicians and journalists have ignored and/or are still ignorant of Prof Samuelson’s honest analysis, and they persist in their robotic mantra-chanting about the virtues of Free Trade. Please note that in opposing blind ideological Free Trade that this does not mean that I am against Trade! Free Trade has benefited the cartels, big business and the banks, while devastating small businesses and family farms. Tariffs like profits is not a ‘dirty word’ – it simple means a tax on imports. Governments need taxation income, so if it does not come from tariffs then it needs to come from income tax on hard-working individuals etc.
We seem to be the end suppository (I know) for all the non recyclable imports that go into land fill.
Without any thought about getting some money from them so we can deal with future epa taxes or regulations.
Many FTA’s include ‘Sovereign Risk’ clauses which prohibit Sovereign Governments from taking punitive redress against another nation’s corporations which harm our Nation or companies. (Fact check invited !)
I worked amongst economists in the past and none of them understands that if you tell a lie it’s a lie but if you tell a lie 1,000 times it becomes a truth. There are 4 basic things that make a country competitive in a world where countries behave like companies. A bad performing country can finish up being owned by a good performing country. China already effectively owns 4 countries and a few years ago tried to tell Australia, “we own you”. So far we have resisted the rhetoric but perhaps not the inevitability. There is little need to invade a country when you can buy them, Money doesn’t need to be mined it doesn’t need to be printed, it can be created electronically with the push of a button. All that’s then needed is some foolish country to borrow some of this created money or sell their silverware so to speak. So Malcolm mentioned 2 of the 4 things needed to be competitive. Wages, yes, beaurocracy yes, innovation is the third and whilst we do well for our population we rely on foreign innovation so that only leaves the exchange rate. That’s where economists fail because they are brainwashed into thinking “floating exchange rate, we have no control.” We do but a bunch of other poor policies get in the way and that’s too big a story for a comment already too big.
Every empty seat in that parliament is actually a million Aussies who stand by “YOU” mate, they are the GLOBAL ENEMY soulded out Traitors, & their Talmudic Media henchmen!
Free trade agreements reduce Australian wages to the same as the nation which we have that agreement.
China, India for instance completely destroyed the motor vehicle industry and any other industry we had.
China assumes that a free trade agreement means that they can buy as much land and water and business as they like but we can’t fo the same in china. Sorry it should never work that way when its actually the peoples liberation army that is doing the purchasing. 51% of all chinas busines is owned by the pla. We should ban same $ amount of trade with them as they have with us. Motor vehicles should be right at the top of the list. And then that’s free trade.