Business Council of Australia (BCA) chief, Jennifer Westacott, has defended the labour market provisions in the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA), claiming they have “sufficient safeguards to protect Australian workers and salary rates”. From The Australian:
Ms Westacott said the current agreement as it had been struck and the guidelines that had been put in place indicated that there were sufficient safeguards to protect Australian workers and salary rates.She said while Labor had not put forward its amendments, it had to explain “what is the problem we are trying to fix here?”…
Ms Westacott said there had been no changes to the labour market testing regime that had been enacted by the previous Gillard government under the 457 visa program.
Skills assessments under the agreement were the same as for 180 other countries.
“What is it we’d add to that to solve what problem?’’ she said.
One wonders whether Ms Westacott has been living under a rock?
Fact checks released in recent months by The Conversation (here and here) and The ABC each found that the ChAFTA could lead to projects being wholly staffed by Temporary Skilled Chinese migrant workers with absolutely no labour market testing requirement.
Joanna Howe, a senior law lecturer at Adelaide University and Rhodes Scholar who has advised the Coalition government on its temporary 457 visa program, has provided the most scathing assessment, last week claiming that ChAFTA would “effectively surrender [Australia’s] autonomy over its migration laws” and invite a wave of Chinese workers into Australia, driving down local wages and conditions:
Dr Howe’s report – the result of three months spent sifting through the FTA and its attachments – found the agreement negotiated by Trade Minister Andrew Robb “greatly increases the pathways for Chinese workers to enter the Australian labour market”…
Dr Howe’s report found that unless employers are required by law to prove a skills shortage exists, it will be “entirely possible” under the FTA for a hospital or care home, for example, to simply choose to replace its Australian nurses with Chinese nurses.
Engineers and “most trades” will also be exposed to direct competition from imported Chinese labour under the FTA as it is currently drafted.
In Dr Howe’s assessment, Article 10.4, paragraph 3, of the FTA prevents the Australian government from putting any cap on the number of 457 visas issued to Chinese workers in two critical lower skilled categories: “contractual service suppliers of China” – basically trade qualified workers and “installers and servicers of China” – low skilled workers who will be able to access temporary visas.
“Even if the Australian government wished to constrain the number of 457 visa holders more generally because local unemployment was high or to reflect changing economic circumstances, it could not do so with respect to Chinese citizens,” Dr Howe found.
“The absence of a cap means that Australian employers can engage unlimited numbers of Chinese citizens on 457 visas.
Proper due process requires that ChAFTA and other trade deals be referred to the Productivity Commission for assessment before a vote in parliament. Only then can we be confident that the costs arising from the agreement are properly weighed against the purported benefits in determining whether the deal is in the national interest.
Unfortunately, the whole process surrounding Australia’s trade negotiations stinks. Not only are independent assessments never conducted prior to ratification, but DFAT has failed to undertake independent analysis to work out whether past trade agreements have delivered positive outcomes. This all but assures that trade deals over-promise and under-deliver, as is very likely to be the case once again with the ChAFTA.
