Labor has called on the government to submit the revived Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement to economic analysis, saying the public has a right to know if it will actually benefit Australia.
It has also rejected attempts by the Coalition to paint it as anti-trade, saying it will always support “good quality” trade agreements that create jobs but it retains the right to be sceptical of deals done in secret.
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on Wednesday lauded the resuscitation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which had been on life support since Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the deal a year ago.
He said 11 countries – Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam – had reached agreement on a revised version of the agreement at an officials-level meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday night.
The Australian reported that Turnbull will meet Donald Trump on 23 February on a trip to the US with state premiers, but on Wednesday the prime minister said he did not see any prospect of the US rejoining the TPP under Trump.
“It’s important to recognise that President Trump made a very straightforward, a very committed election promise not to proceed with the TPP,” Turnbull said.
The trade deal has been renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to account for the United States’ exclusion. The agreement will be signed in March in Chile.
“This is a multi-billion-dollar win for Australian jobs. Australian workers, businesses, farmers and consumers will benefit,” Turnbull said in a joint statement with the trade minister, Steve Ciobo. “Labor and Bill Shorten declared this trade agreement dead – they urged the government to walk away. If Labor got their way, Bill Shorten would have shut Australia out of this historic agreement and denied our farmers, manufacturers, services providers and consumers the big wins the TPP delivers.
“The government will never give up on measures that create jobs for Australians,” they said.
But the shadow trade minister, Jason Clare, said the government needed to submit the revised deal to economic modelling. He said the deal was radically different without the United States’ involvement and voters ought to be told how it will affect Australia’s farmers and manufacturers.
“The original TTP was made up of countries that represented 40% of the world economy,” Clare said. “This represents about 13% of the world economy. It’s also struck out or suspended about 20 different clauses, so it’s a different agreement.
“I have said in the past that an agreement like this has merit. It will provide modest economic benefits for the economy, that’s what the World Bank said about the original agreement.
“[But] we don’t have the same sort of World Bank analysis of this agreement as we had with the last one.”
The government had refused to submit the original TPP to economic modelling, saying the World Bank had already done so.
The World Bank analysis showed Australia’s economy would grow by less than 1% as a result of the deal.
The analysis found by 2030, Australia’s gross domestic product could increase by just 0.7% as a result of the agreement. By contrast, Vietnam’s GDP could rise by 10% and Malaysia’s by 8%.
The treasurer, Scott Morrison, said Labor was stalling and modelling was not needed to prove “economic common sense”.
“Labor would think you’d need economic modelling to decide whether you put your pants on one leg at a time,” he told Sky News on Thursday.
But James Pearson, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive, said the trade deal must to be analysed properly.
“It’s also important that the government does something that the parliament has recommended and that is subject the deal to a full and proper independent economic analysis so we can be absolutely sure about where the benefits lie,” he told Sky News on Wednesday.
The Labor frontbencher Richard Marles said there was a “lot of politics” in Morrison’s comment.
“If you look at Labor’s history and and how we go about things right now, we have always been in favour of trade liberalisation,” he said.
“The TPP itself really is the practical trade manifestation of APEC and the Hawke-Keating [Labor] government was absolutely instrumental in having APEC established.”
With Australian Associated Press
