Helen Liddell – 2023 Speech on the Australia/New Zealand Trade Bill (Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke)

The comments made by Helen Liddell, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke, in the House of Lords on 9 January 2023.

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his position. It is quite exciting to do your first Bill before any House and he has got off to a good start. I used to have a colleague in the other place who, at the end of a speech, would often say “it says here” because that way they could get out of any problems that had been created. I used to get notes from the civil servants saying, “Please read out paragraph 3 because that is the one that the judges need to hear about,” because I would quite frequently avoid doing that.

I have to announce to the House that I have no relatives in Australia or New Zealand, but I have spent a little time in Australia as British high commissioner. I followed in the footsteps of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, who had laid an excellent foundation for me and managed to keep me out of an awful lot of trouble.

Let me see if I have this right about this Bill. This Bill is needed to ensure that the procurement provisions of the trade deals with both Australia and New Zealand can go ahead with no delays. However, this Bill is to be superseded by the Procurement Bill that is starting in the other place in the next couple of days. That Procurement Bill will repeal this Bill, and both Bills have to go on the statute book around the same time. I have lost the plot here. I know that is not something I should admit to. Sometimes, I think I have followed my namesake Alice through the looking-glass, because this is the most bizarre arrangement I have ever come across in relation to a piece of legislation.

We are going to have to pass this Bill when we have been denied the full opportunity for scrutiny. That is a major issue. On both sides of the House, there have been arguments about the need for scrutiny of trade Bills. Furthermore, there is no published trade strategy, so how can we know whether these deals meet the criteria set for the negotiators? It is a very difficult thing to try to do. I am not casting aspersions on the Minister but there can sometimes be an addiction to hyperbole on the part of the Government. Not everything is an absolutely wonderful deal. There are failings in these deals; they are the first we have done since leaving the EU and it is no surprise that there will be difficulties. I can remember, as a Minister, standing at the Bar of the House and suddenly discovering from some of the experts on these Benches that I had completely ignored engineering in an energy Bill. I had to go back and table amendments. It happens; we do not get everything right all the time. I strive to get some things right occasionally, but my family say that I do not.

If we are to take these deals as setting the pace for trade deals around the world, we need to take into account things that are quite controversial, such as the CPTPP. We need more information and, again, more scrutiny, to be able to go down that path because in the CPTPP countries there are a number of examples of trade deals that we would be quite uncomfortable with—on both sides of the House—in this country.

One thing that concerns me about the Bill—it is very narrowly drawn Bill—is whether this is how we are going to be expected to scrutinise other treaties. Are we going to have to do everything by statutory instruments? That is not the right way to properly scrutinise something as significant as a trade Bill. It raises issues about the responsibility of government to Parliament. It is an unfortunate path to go down. I know that the Minister has met the International Agreements Committee, of which I have been a member since its inception, and we are enormously grateful for that, but we want to know: where are the transparency and openness in the debates and advice that have to be put before us? This very constrained Bill is the only opportunity that both Houses have to scrutinise these trade deals. The United States has better provision for the scrutiny of trade deals than we have in this country. That should be a warning to us that we need much better scrutiny.

Obviously, having spent time in Australia, I am going to concentrate on it. People do not seem to realise that Australia is 32 times the size of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom can fit into the Northern Territory with quite a lot of space left over. When the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, was trying to get it through to me that this was actually quite a big country, he showed me a postcard that had the United Kingdom in a corner of New South Wales. It is not just the fact that Australia is a big, big country; it also has 25 million people, while we have 67 million—and there are an awful lot of farms in Australia. They are known as properties and some of them can be the size of countries within the United Kingdom because of their scale. No wonder that we end up with a disparity between what the agricultural community says about the Bill and what the Minister has said from the Dispatch Box.

The Australians are delighted with this deal, as well they should be. But our Government gloss over the projected growth in GDP by 2035, which is only 0.08%. We have to bear that in mind and see what we can do to advance it. That could be why the Australian Government’s website is much more helpful to those of us who want to analyse the deal, while the UK Government have been remarkably coy. If you want information about this trade deal, go on to the Australian Government’s site and then you will get it.

I want to make one very particular point, given my Scottish accent. I want to thank the Australians for the deal done on Scotch whisky. That has suffered from what I used to describe as a nuisance tax, which was introduced to protect Bundaberg rum. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, will be speaking in a few minutes’ time. The one problem that I always found with it was that Bundaberg is owned by Diageo, which owns most of the whisky distilleries in Scotland, so I could not quite work that one out. I have to be absolutely honest: Diageo allowed me to have a Scotch whisky evening every month so that we could promote the case for reducing the tariffs on Scotch whisky. Maybe the noble Lord, Lord Frost, knows the answer to that given his background in the Scotch whisky industry, because I have not a clue what it is.

Labour has said in the other place that the Bill will not be opposed. However, there are very real concerns about, for example, animal welfare, agriculture in general, and the lack of any provision for decent work and social goals through procurement. Lots of us know of young people who have gone out on two-year visas; some of them find themselves in pretty appalling circumstances. We need to make sure, as the migration period into Australia is increased to up to three years, that those who go as migrants are protected by the trade union laws and by the social and political goals. The TUC and the Australian Council of Trade Unions have made the same point, but in this country there seems to have been no interchange with the TUC about the difficulties around migrant workers in Australia. I recommend to the Minister that something needs to be done about that. A lot of Members on the other side, particularly in the other place, depend on rural communities, yet the most vociferous criticism of the deal comes from those communities. There is a problem here and it really has to be addressed.

It is significant that there has been a change of Government and now a much more engaged agenda on climate change in Australia. That could create huge opportunities for UK companies which are forging ahead strongly on renewables, carbon capture, storage and use. I refer to my entry in the register of interests as the president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association. Under the previous Australian Labour Government there was considerable interest in CCS and use, with an experimental operation in Latrobe Valley. What attempts have been made to open the door to environmental businesses in this country in renewables and CCS and use? Under Prime Minister Albanese, who has made it quite clear he takes a completely different view on climate change from Prime Minister Morrison, there are opportunities to extend our success with the industry in Australia. During the passage of the Bill, we will want to know what prospects there are for that kind of improvement and let it be known that the lack of scrutiny afforded to Parliament casts the Government in a poor light. What are the Government frightened of when it comes to scrutiny?

Doing a deal with Australia and New Zealand is very important. Lots of people in Australia—a very high proportion—carry British passports. That is not true of politicians, because they have to resign their British passport when they enter Parliament, but they all take it back up when they leave Parliament; it is quite a nice little side deal for the Home Office to reissue these passports. We have some of our oldest security arrangements with Australia and New Zealand. They are our friends. It is good that our first deal is with them.

I look forward to the processes around this Bill, but I am deeply concerned that we are going to do scrutiny by statutory instruments. It is not the way in which a sophisticated Parliament should scrutinise trade deals.