Sunday, 11 October 2015

Labor warns Turnbull to negotiate on ChAFTA

Labor has made it clear they will oppose the China Australia Free Trade Agreement in it's current form in the senate. Pointing specifically to Abbott's confrontational style of non-negotiation and chucking a tantrum when things didn't go his way, Penny Wong of Labor has challenged Turnbull to negotiate with Labor if he doesn't want the trade deal blocked in the senate.
Labor will release details of its plan to safeguard Australian jobs under the China free trade agreement, trade spokeswoman Penny Wong says. 

And she has challenged Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to take a different tack to his predecessor Tony Abbott and negotiate over the proposals, rather than "hurling insults at anyone who raised concerns". 

And Trade Minister Andrew Robb has signalled the government would examine changes proposed by Labor as long as they did not change the "fundamentals" of the deal.

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"We want to support the China free trade agreement. We're long-standing supporters of a stronger, deeper, economic and political relationship with China, but the government has gone further in this agreement than in other free trade agreements when it comes to opening up the labour market and also in relation to the special project-based labour agreements which are known as IFAs under the China free trade agreement," she told the ABC. 

"Now we have some complementary safeguards we will be proposing. We'll be putting them out next week. They will be consistent with the agreement. They will be non-discriminatory." ​

Senator Wong said that, for example, the free trade agreement Australia had with Chile did not remove labour market testing for tradespeople, but the China deal did and that "we think they [ALP concerns] can be resolved by the amendments at the complementary safeguards that we'll put forward". Read more   
These are promising signals from Labor in regards to the TPP. 

 

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