Melissa Price custom amendment

If you wish to know more about Melissa Price's voting patterns, there is a very useful sight that you can use which will save you a trip through parliamentary records here. 

If you wish to know more about the custom's amendment bill itself, the whole saga is linked here, and is where I got a lot of my information for this article.

Melissa Price is the elected member for Durack. During the 2022 election season I had decided to look into her voting habits and came across a very disturbing history. One such example of terrible voting choices pertains to an elusively named "Customs Amendment" bill.

Melissa Price voted against the "Customs Amendment (Growing Australian Export Opportunities Across the Asia-Pacific) Bill 2019 - Protect Australian industry” (I don’t think I will ever figure out how to discreetly state the name of a policy or amendment) pushed by Labor’s Madeline King. 

To give a preface rundown: Melissa Price and her party were the ones trying to pass a customs Amendment Bill. The Labor party wished to amend it to make it less terrible, and The Liberal party attempted to vote out the amendment as a result.

This Customs Amendment Bill seeks to verify free trade agreements with countries like Indonesia, Hong Kong, and weirdly Peru of all place. Free trade agreements are ratified by amending the Customs Tariff Act 1995 to basically make items from those countries less expensive to trade. The concept of the bill was supported by both parties, with the idea of an Asia Pacific free trade agreement argued by the Labor party for a long time, however there are a handful of differences in how each party wanted to implement the bill. 

The liberal party wanted to use this bill as an opportunity to allow foreign labour to be imported with reckless abandon and let private foreign companies sue governments for ungodly large sums of money in the same vein as when the tobacco company Phillip Morris attempted to sue Australia because of plain packaging legislation introduced by the Labor party. The Labor party wanted the free trade agreement to simply allow for the nation to take advantage of its exporting nature without compromising sovereignty or job security. When it comes down to it, although it seems like both Liberal and Labor supported a customs amendment, much like in those industry super ads you see on TV, there is a lot of difference between what either party wanted.

This is why you should care about which major party is in power, because although it may sometimes seem they agree on the same things, the differences in how they want things done can make a huge difference to the way of life in Australia. The two parties are the same narrative is something that is pushed by the Murdoch and Nine-Fairfax press in order to demotivate people from voting in preference of Labor or in preference to Labor. 

Market testing

First interesting piece of information in this policy decision is Labor Market Testing.

According to the Home Affairs website, Labour Market testing is when an employer wishes to bring in a worker from overseas, they must first go through a process that tests whether or not they are able to get workers for that job in Australia. The Visa that allows for imported foreign Labor can only be introduced when the position has been advertised, in clear English, with the appropriate information like position description, for at least four weeks to give Australian workers time to respond. The advertisements have to be placed in at least two prominent recruitment places such as websites or major media outlets.

At first the Liberals wanted to pass the bill without proper labour market testing. Labour market testing ensures that foreign workforces are only allowed to work if there is a genuine lack of Australian workers. Essentially ensuring Australians get the first chance at any job in Australia. The Labor party has ensured that this market testing occurs properly.

Old ISDS provisions

Out with the old, in with the new. The Customs Amendment Bill introduced new treaty content with Indonesia, but in the Liberal parties draft there was nothing to suggest the old treaties, which allowed foreign companies to sue Australia, would be terminated. 

The Labor party sought to terminate the old treaty with Indonesia once the new treaty was implemented in order to eliminate the ability for multinational corporations to sue the Australian government for the Australian government attempting to introduce legislation that would affect the profits of a corporation. 

The aspect of the old treaty that Labor sought to eliminate were the ISDS or “investor-State Dispute Settlement” provisions. A term that in the first half makes me think of the Hyperion corporation from the borderlands and the second half makes me think of regional property settlement agencies.  This provision provided a foreign company the framework to sue a government if said government enacted a policy that hurt it's profits. One example could be if the government wanted to make more forest a protected area a foreign logging company could sue the government as they wont be able to log in that area. 

According to the Liberals amendment, The court is held by a third party outside of the government's jurisdiction, and will only be accessible by foreign companies, not domestic companies. This third party system is run as a tribunal of three corporate lawyers, which means it doesn’t follow normal court rules and cannot be appealed.

The Australian Council of Trade unions, which is the body that represents nearly every union in Australia, attacked this policy in particular, labelling it as “the most threatening and the most dangerous” part of the trade agreement, as it gives an “unacceptable expansion of the rights of corporate investors at the expense of democratic governments”

The Labor party has fought to remove these clauses from the customs amendment bill in the senate.

The election is now over, but these historical voting patterns are still worth remembering. It can be difficult to understand and explain the sometimes very technical and seemingly indifferent differences between governmental policies, but it is VITAL. Big parties are the ones that form government and make the decisions, understanding the differences between them can mean a lot for the future of this country.

thank you for reading through this article. This article was based on a video I made during the 2022 election season  while I was investigating my local member at the time's voting patterns, which were very disturbing and blatantly against the interest of the electorate she represented.