With the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement passing the Senate last week, investigative journalist, Michael West, claims the deal leads Australia “along the path to corporatocracy”:
This deal is another milestone along the path to corporatocracy, another capitulation of a sovereign government to foreign corporate interests, another subversion of democracy. It comes in the same month that the government abandoned, again, its pledge to bring in laws to tackle money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing. It has dithered for ten years in the face of lobbying from vested interests in real estate, law and accounting.
Academic and trade expert Patricia Ranald penned this piece in the lead-up to the trade deal, laying out the dangers of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses and labor market provisions. In the facing of opposition from many party members, Labor still backed the bill, pledging that it would seek to overturn those provisions when it came to office…
Dr Ranald describes the perils of the trade deal and says it is unlikely the provisions will be overturned. We are stuck with them, although concocted with no independent modelling or clear evidence there will be any significant economic benefit.
We know the TPP contains nasties including ISDS as well as extensions to patent and copyright protections, which are unlikely to be captured in the modelling, not to mention easier access to wage-crushing foreign labour.
The deal was never referred to the Productivity Commission (PC) for its expert assessment of the costs and benefits prior to a parliamentary vote, despite the PC explicitly recommending greater oversight and scrutiny of FTAs before they are signed.
Presumably, the PC’s exclusion from assessing the TPP stems from it being highly sceptical of the agreement, citing particular concerns around intellectual property and ISDS. The Government didn’t want the truth getting out.
Regardless, Australia’s parliament failed, yet again, to follow due process and signed Australia up to another potentially costly trade deal without rigorous assessment.
To The Greens’ credit, they stood firm until the end against the TPP. The same cannot be said for Labor – the fake workers’ party – which pathetically caved at the first sign of pressure from the corporate sector.
