Steve Ciobo: Kicking heads all the way to Davos

Australia’s trade minister, Steve Ciobo has recently signed us up to the TPP with a flourish of complete drivel:

Mr Ciobo challenged Labor to support the deal, saying freer trade was responsible for a significant slice of the 403,000 jobs created in Australia last year.

“If they win government, they can seek to renegotiate any aspect they like. But they should not hold to ransom economic growth and future job growth by opposing what is a very good deal,” he said.

Even though the benefits of the deal are very vague if not entirely negative.

Now Ciobo is working another dud deal, the RECP:

“RCEP covers half the world’s population and a third of the world’s trade. If we secure a good agreement this would be, as one of our colleagues said this morning, an antithesis to protectionism.”

The RCEP is being negotiated between ASEAN countries along with China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand…

Australia was an enthusiastic backer of the TPP, which it said was a “high-standard agreement.” It has been less enthusiastic about the RCEP but the negotiations were given a push at the summit. Mr Lee said Singapore and Australia were redoubling efforts to get a deal done preferably this year.

While RCEP is less ambitious than the TPP, it still provides value for Australian exporters by harmonising rules across key markets.

The deal is known to include some of the same deleterious features that are present in the TPP, at the behest of the business lobby:

Leaked chapters of the draft agreement contain the same sort of investor-state dispute settlement procedures as the TPP…

Whereas in the TPP, Australia’s delegations took community as well as business groups into its confidence, so far with the RCEP it’s only been business groups. Patricia Ranald of the Fair Trade and Investment Network says that might be because, at least to start with, the US is excluded. It’s a relatively open democracy. China, Indonesia, Malaysia and other RCEP members are not.

Just as with the TPP, our negotiators are releasing no texts and submitting none of what’s proposed to cost-benefit analysis. There’s every chance it will cut across rather than intermesh with the TPP and our other trade agreements. There’s every chance we won’t be told until it’s too late.

It’s another secretive mega trade deal that will open Australian taxpayers up to legal challenges from multinationals, thus potentially endangering public health safeguards, environmental protections and workers’ rights, as well as risking ”regulatory chill” – a phenomenon whereby the government reverses or fails to pursue important regulations due to fear of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) lawsuits.

Ciobo has repeatedly entered the population debate and made a complete goose of himself. Recently he declared population growth can’t impact house prices because only Sydney and Melbourne are expensive even though that’s where 86% of migrants are going. He previously claimed that the rise in foreign investors in housing was actually just Australians mistaking Chinese Australians for foreigners.

Today we have a picture of our trade minister stomping his asinine way across the global press:

…the recent example set by our esteemed trade minister Steve Ciobo who, while talking on a business panel in Davos, wore snow boots that looked like two enormous beehives attacking his feet. Splendid Australian that he is, he somehow missed the memo that when wearing a suit inside, at a World Economic Forum no less, the discreet business shoe is the order of the day.

If the shoe fits…