A Chinese diplomat’s warning against allowing the free trade agreement with Australia to “slip through our fingers” is unlikely to prompt any swift resolution of the political dispute in Canberra about job safeguards.
China’s ambassador to Australia, Ma Zhaoxu, was due to say in a speech on Tuesday evening that the China-Australia free trade agreement, known as Chafta, marked a high point in ties between the two countries and should be brought into force as quickly as possible.
“It represents a hard-won and historic opportunity that should not be allowed to slip through our fingers,” Ma was set to tell an event in Melbourne, according to speech notes that were provided to the Australian newspaper in advance.
The Australian parliament will debate the implementation legislation after the joint standing committee on treaties completes a report on Chafta in October. Business groups and the government – which are running advertisements promoting the deal – want the bills to pass before the end of the year so tariff cuts can begin quickly.
But the fundamentals of the political standoff in Australia remain unchanged by the ambassador’s intervention. The Coalition seized on the comments to reiterate its existing demands for Labor to support Chafta, while Labor renewed its previous calls for bipartisan talks to secure a compromise.
Australia’s minister for international development and the Pacific, Steven Ciobo, said Chafta was “the trade agreement of a generation” and “a landmark deal that will bring Australia and China even closer together”.
“Ultimately, I am confident that, at the conclusion of our parliamentary processes, the agreement will receive the support of the Australian parliament,” Ciobo was due to say in a speech at the same event addressed by the Chinese ambassador.
“Disappointingly, though, the agreement has brought on some opportunistic politicking by the federal Labor opposition.”
Labor, which has been calling for “complementary” safeguards to ensure job vacancies in Australia are advertised to local people before companies seek overseas workers, has sought a meeting with the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to discuss legislative options.
Turnbull said last week he would be open to talking to Labor about any specific proposals, and had had an initial phone conversation with the opposition leader, Bill Shorten. But Labor said the government was yet to tee up the requested meeting and it was still awaiting a formal response to its 15 September letter.
Labor’s acting leader and trade spokeswoman, Penny Wong, was asked on Tuesday about the ambassador’s comments and whether she would welcome a compromise with Turnbull.
Wong said the opposition understood “the importance of the Chinese economy and the Chinese nation to Australia’s future”.
“This is something Labor has been not only talking about, but acting upon, for decades, ever since there was diplomatic recognition of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] by a Labor government,” she said in Adelaide.
“What we say about the trade agreement, it does have great potential to create jobs here in Australia. We want to make sure that Australians get the first opportunity for those jobs.”
Wong said the opposition had made it clear to Turnbull that it wanted to find a bipartisan solution. “We want to find a way through here, but we need to see safeguards, complementary safeguards to the agreement around jobs, around Australian wages and conditions, avoiding the exploitation of migrant workers and of course maintaining Australian standards when it comes to our trades,” she said.
“Now, we are willing to sit down with him and find away through this. The failure of the government to do that I think speaks volumes.”
Asked whether she had met the Chinese ambassador personally to explain Labor’s position, Wong said: “As you would anticipate, I will meet with the Chinese ambassador on a regular basis, given my portfolio responsibilities.”
Ciobo said he was hopeful that Shorten would “take the counsel of the wiser heads” on the Labor side of politics and support the agreement, whose symbolic value could not be underestimated.
“There are plenty of people in the Australian Labor party who are neither anti-trade nor anti-China,” he said.
“I want all of them to send a message to Bill Shorten to move away from the extreme fringe and join the Coalition in supporting the China-Australia free trade agreement, because there is just too much Australia would miss out on if we walked away from this agreement.”
The former prime minister, Tony Abbott, had previously ruled out talks with Labor because “there is absolutely nothing to negotiate here” and he put a motion to parliament demanding Chafta be supported in its existing form.
In response to that parliamentary motion, Shorten spelled out his demands for legislative safeguards and other assurances about the effect of Chafta.
He wanted “mandatory labour-market testing for projects over $150m, an assurance that Australian skills and safety will be maintained and that Australian wages will not be undercut”.
Labour-market testing is a requirement that companies try to find local workers before seeking to hire people from overseas. Shorten’s comments indicated the opposition was focused on the memorandum of understanding that the government reached for Chinese-backed infrastructure development projects worth at least $150m.
The document – which does not form part of the formal treaty but was negotiated at the same time – says no labour-market testing is required to enter into one of these overarching “investment facilitation arrangements”. But the memo leaves the door open for the immigration department to force the direct employers of overseas workers to do so.
The government has argued employers will be required, as a matter of policy, to apply labour-market testing but Labor has suggested the assurances are inadequate and should be put beyond doubt in legislation. Labor has argued its demands will not require a renegotiation of the formal treaty with Beijing.
