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The Hon. Jason Clare Shadow Minister for Trade and Investment House of Representatives Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600
September 2016

Dear Shadow Minister Clare,

RE: Joint Education Unions response to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement
As leaders of the Australian Education Union (AEU), Independent Education Union (IEU) and National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), we would like to congratulate you on your recent promotion to Shadow Minister for Trade and Investment.

We are writing to highlight an issue that will likely have a significant impact on the working lives of our members, the 250,000 teachers, academics and professional staff working in schools, colleges, early childhood and vocational settings, universities and research institutes in all states and territories of Australia.

We are calling upon you and the ALP to support a Senate Inquiry into the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and to vote against the implementing legislation for this dangerous trade deal. Earlier this year, we wrote a Joint Letter to the Committee Secretary of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, about our concerns with the TPP. We have attached this letter for your interest and attention. The letter highlights that:

1. The TPP will fundamentally limit the capacity of Australian governments to protect and preserve the quality of education in Australia.
2. We are highly critical of the Australian government’s failure to include a comprehensive carve-out in relation to public education. In particular, we are critical of the public documents composed by DFAT which falsely assert that “certain Investor State
   Dispute Settlement (ISDS) claims in specific policy areas in Australia cannot be challenged including social services established or maintained for a public purpose, such as public education”. In fact, the claimed ISDS “safeguards” are not substantially different from those in previous agreements and will not prevent future ISDS cases. The only clear exclusion is for tobacco regulation.
3. We are concerned that the TPP agreement establishes conditions that will accelerate unethical cross-border trade in education goods and services, particularly in relation to private educational services. Australia has already conducted a failed experiment in the privatisation of Vocational Education and Training (VET). The absence of a comprehensive carve-out in the TPP would expose future Australian governments to the threat of ISDS cases from foreign education providers, where future legislative changes seek to limit policy failures around deregulation. This is particular dangerous in the context that the Australian Government is currently experimenting with the P-TECH model, and the TPP would lock in legislative arrangements that provide public subsidies to companies involved the provision of primary and secondary education. It is also dangerous considering that the Australian government may still open public subsidies to private higher education providers, based upon its Driving Innovation discussion paper introduced in May.
4. There is no independent cost-benefit analysis which can assure the Australian public that the TPP is actually in the national economic interest. One of the few independent studies available suggests there will in fact be a net loss of 39,000 jobs in Australia alone over a ten year period.
5. Consultation by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) over the TPP was woefully inadequate and industry-based trade unions have been left out of negotiations and many other potential points in this process. We have previously called upon government to reduce the democratic deficit in relation to treaty making processes, but the Australian government actually declined to make any changes to the Commonwealth treaty-making process explored in the Senate Committee report Blind Agreement.
   Like other trade unions we are also concerned that the TPP labour chapter contains only weak provisions on labour rights which are not effectively enforceable, with no testing if local workers are available before bringing in temporary overseas workers. We are in addition concerned about the effects of the TPP on the costs of medicine and the environment.

We are concerned tht key industries that will be transformed by the trade in services sections of the TPP especially in relation to the global online provision of education. Minter Ellison publicly asserted this on 9 May, stating “the TPP, if it enters into force, will be an important element in the globalised world of higher education”. These arrangements may open new education markets to Australian education institutions and protect our foreign interests through access to the TPP’s investment protection regime provisions, however, it also exposes Australian students to a dangerous new environment in which all foreign providers enjoy protections from domestic regulation.

While we understand that the prospects for the TPP depend upon the United States, and that the rejection by the two presidential candidates leaves little room for certification of the trade agreement during the next ‘lame duck’ sessions of the Houses of Congress and Senate, as a union movement we emphasise that there are not only substantial failures in the terms of the agreement, but fundamental problems in the negotiation, which allowed for such poor engagement with civil society groups to occur, and which provided such a poor trade agreement to be undertaken on our behalf. These failures deserve greater public scrutiny and we believe the ALP’s strong position against ISDS deserves to be explored through a review of the TPP negotiations.

We would welcome the opportunity to present our concerns to you directly. We can be contacted at the NTEU National Office on (03) 9254 1910 through Dr Jen Tsen Kwok (jtkwok@nteu.org.au) or Jeannie Rea (jrea@nteu.org.au).

Yours sincerely,

JEANNIE REA
NTEU National President

CORRENA HAYTHORPE
AEU Federal President

CHRIS WATT
IEU Federal Secretary