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.
