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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4008 ..

Tasmanian salmon example raises important questions about the adverse effect on environmental sustainability of areas included in Australia’s commitment schedule that will be subject to trade liberalisation.

The committee also made the point that the impact on social sustainability has to be given much closer scrutiny as well. We took another example there, once again related to water, as put to the committee by the Australian Consumers Association in its submission, that is, that as a result of the liberalisation of water services in Bolivia the price of water increased significantly, making it unaffordable for poorer people. In that environment there were bloody confrontations between the people and the government. In other countries consumer groups discovered that foreign owned, underregulated private monopolies, with little or no improvement in service, replaced inefficient government monopolies.

The point made very clearly in this report is that we have to be much more careful about what we are actually doing, because once we have made a commitment to liberalise particular service areas we are effectively binding ourselves to the results of that, regardless of the negative social or environmental outcomes, as the consequences are legal action or monetary penalty. As I just explained with the salmon example, it is very difficult to deal with any kind of dispute. One of the reasons for that, of course, is that, because there is no social or environmental analysis, or even reasonable economic analysis in lots of ways, brought into any of the process, you do not actually have the opportunity to raise these legitimate public policy concerns. That is why the committee made its recommendation about the dispute settlement process, a very important recommendation.

As Mr Smyth said, the committee also looked briefly at the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. We have acknowledged in the report the important concerns raised by AFTINET. AFTINET urged the federal government to observe a number of items in all proposed trade negotiations. The first was the need to cease any negotiations that could endanger important social policies. It was made clear to the committee in evidence that there has been no testing of the claims of the Australian government that important essential services will be protected. That has not been tested.

It was recommended that the federal government commission comprehensive independent research into both the social and economic impacts of all proposed trade agreements, including regional impacts, and that it be published for public debate before negotiations begin; ensure that essential public services like health, education and water and health and social policies like access to medicines, food labelling and quarantine are excluded from all trade negotiations; ensure that cultural and audiovisual services are excluded from all trade negotiations; and ensure that all trade agreements are debated and decided by parliament, not just by cabinet.

Basically, we have reflected those concerns in our recommendations. Interestingly, the Senate committee’s report reflects pretty much the concerns we are reflecting in this report. It was interesting to look at the recommendations of the Labor senators regarding the free trade agreement with the United States. As I was looking at their 42 recommendations I was thinking how ironic it was that we have had such a lot of debate about pharmaceutical benefits, which we were told originally by the government

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