Despite their name, free trade agreements are never free. These agreements always come at a cost to someone, and that’s usually everyday Australians, workers and business owners. Once signed into existence, these agreements are not subject to sufficient scrutiny.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I say that One Nation supports fair trade agreements. Is the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement the spawn of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Is it free trade or fair trade? It’s certainly not free trade. Each of the signatories have carved out substantial areas of their economies from the agreement. This information is tucked away, hidden away in annexes where it would seem not enough have looked. Tariffs are being defended. Schemes that protect the power base of local politicians are being defended, at Australia’s cost. There are hundreds of pages of carve-outs in this agreement. Many of them are ours. That’s probably a good thing. But the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement is not a free trade agreement. It is at best slightly freer trade.
In the Productivity Commission submission dated July 2022 to the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties into certain aspects of the treaty-making process in Australia, the Productivity Commission comes out and basically supports what I’m about to say. The government prepared a national interest analysis on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement and found it did provide a net benefit to Australia. This was relied upon by the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and subsequently endorsed by the Morrison-Joyce government and the alternative Albanese-Bandt government. This consensus of the establishment parties is disconcerting. Despite their name, free trade agreements are never free. These agreements always come at a cost to someone, and that’s usually everyday Australians, workers and business owners. Underdeveloped countries do not sign free trade agreements with industrialised nations in order to give away what they have. It’s the industrialised nations that give away their wealth, our wealth, through lower tariffs, greater market access of cheaper goods and greater incursion of foreign workers into our Australian economy. They’re facts.
Free trade in this situation is a race to the bottom. The nation with the worst environmental protections, the lowest wages, the worst working conditions, the crudest and most unsafe working conditions will win every time, in effect dragging our conditions down at the same time as dragging theirs up. Our environment loses. Our wages lose. Everyday Australians lose.
I saw nothing in the National Interest Analysis that constituted a genuine attempt to identify who the winners and losers will really be. That’s probably a design feature to allow the establishment parties to take all the electoral gain and protect themselves later from any electoral loss in this election cycle, because all too often in this country, in this parliament, it seems to be about looking good, not doing good.
Once signed into existence, these agreements are not subject to sufficient scrutiny. The last Productivity Commission inquiry into a free trade agreement was in 2010. The last review into Australia’s most important free trade agreement, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, was in 2018. Before Australia enters into future trade agreements, this parliament must address the lack of transparency in the trade negotiation process and the signing of an agreement before this parliament ratifies it.
My next concern is to the new regulatory environment that this agreement will create. In his submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, Bryan Clark from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry highlighted: ‘There are five separate trade agreements with Malaysia. Businesses are getting very confused trying to work out how to use these agreements, and the best outcome for Australian business would actually come from sorting out all this red tape and creating clear rules for Australian businesses.’ I agree completely.
Here’s a specific example of this, thanks to the Australian Fair trade and Investment Network. The United Nations Central Product Classification system used by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement— with the UN it’s always a mouthful, isn’t it; they twist and turn and hide and bury and camouflage in acronyms and long titles that confuse people, so I’ll start again. The United Nations Central Product Classification system used by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement has a separate classification for aged care, which implies that without a specific reservation by Australia any increase in the regulation of aged care would be a breach of this agreement. So if we find something we need to improve and regulate it, it could be a breach of this agreement. The NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association agreed that: ‘At worst, aged care is exposed to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement. At best, there is sufficient ambiguity to allow overseas companies to exploit the framework for their own benefit.’ The globalists, the elites, moving our industries—whole industries, whole sectors, workers, farmers—as pawns in their game of ‘central’, of control and money, and parliaments in this country, without accountability, are their tool. They work through us—this parliament.
The government has responded that there is provision for a review of unexpected consequences so we should not worry aged-care standards will drop under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement. There is, though, no framework in place to ensure this action actually occurs. In the years ahead, we will read stories that the parliaments’ mates, be they union bosses or crony capitalists and globalists, are exploiting loopholes in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement for their own benefit. That’s how they get through unaccountable parliaments. Resolving that will be at the discretion of the minister. This is a terrible system. The benefit of a free-trade agreement must be tested annually. I call on the government to introduce a system of annual review of the economic gains and losses for each of the agreements. Australia will not restore its position as a leading world economy by exposing Australian businesses to unfair competition and multiple layers of red, green and blue tape. Red tape is the bureaucracy. Green tape is pseudo-environmental regulations, impositions, under the guise of environment but really with the intent to control. And blue tape is UN policy on behalf of the UN’s masters, the globalists, who move industries and people around the globe at will.
Australia will not emerge from our self-inflicted COVID-19 recession by destroying business and increasing reliance on government welfare. To restore the wealth of everyday Australians, we must get the government out of the way and let personal free enterprise create wealth again. Ideas, effort, energy, heart—that’s what brings life to an economy when it is a free economy with fair trade. Fair trade has an important role to play in that process—fair trade.
