Malcolm Turnbull’s new Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement gives six countries unlimited access to Australian jobs.
The Turnbull government has agreed to a revived Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that will allow employers to import “temporary” workers from at least six countries without first advertising jobs to Australians.
The TPP will allow unlimited access to workers from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam in 435 occupations.
The peak union body, the ACTU, has strongly criticised the move.
“This agreement will allow employers to overlook local workers for good steady jobs like nurses, engineers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, tilers, mechanics and chefs,” said former ACTU President Ged Kearney.
“In regional areas where youth unemployment is at crisis point this is simply unacceptable.”
She said the failure to make companies test whether local workers were available for jobs would permit the “wholesale exploitation of migrant workers, while also tearing the bottom out of the domestic labour market”.
Labor’s shadow trade minister, Jason Clare, told The Guardian newspaper that Australians “hate” jobs going to migrants “without first checking if there is an Australian who can do that job”.
“Turnbull should put Australian workers first and reinstate labour market testing in the TPP for those countries.”
Labor policy is that, if elected, it would conduct independent modelling of the costs and benefits of every new trade agreement before signing, including the effect on jobs.
A secret till it’s signed
The TPP was thought to be dead after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement last year.
But the Turnbull government lobbied to keep the TPP alive and 11 countries agreed to a new deal without the US last November. However, the text of the agreement has remained secret.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor, Peter Martin, highlighted this secrecy when he asked: “What’s in the revised Trans-Pacific Partnership deal for Australia? There’s no way to tell until we’ve seen the text, and we won’t see it until after it’s signed, in Chile on 8 March.”
Martin said the TPP would allow foreign companies to sue Australian governments in extraterritorial tribunals if they took decisions that harmed their commercial interests – “as Philip Morris did over Australia’s tobacco plain-packaging laws using the terms of an obscure Hong Kong investment agreement”.
“John Howard successfully resisted having them in the US-Australia agreement and the Abbott government managed to avoid them in the Australia–Japan agreement, but we have apparently agreed to them now, for Japan, Korea and eight other nations.
“The best guess as to what the trade and investment concessions do for Australia financially, from the respected Peterson Institute, is ‘not much’. Australia’s national income would eventually be 0.5 per cent higher, a gain of less than half of one-tenth of a per cent per year.”
The new TPP also contains a “state-owned enterprises” provision, which allows foreign companies to take legal action for damages if public enterprises present “unfair competition”.
Dr Patricia Ranald, convener of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET) says the TPP would also restrict Australian governments from re-regulating essential services like energy or financial services, despite demonstrated market failures.
“As usual, the government has released only positive information about possible market access gains from the deal, but the full text of the changes is not available for public scrutiny. The full text will only be released in March at the time of the signing of the deal,” she said.