The Australian Parliament is now expected to sign off on a trade agreement with China by year’s end, after Labor and Liberal Party leaders confirmed that they had reached a deal on domestic labour safeguards to be incorporated into Canberra’s migration policies.
“I am pleased today to be able to report to the parliament that Labor has been able to achieve significant concessions from the Government in negotiations to improve the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement,” said Labor Party leader Bill Shorten in announcing the compromise.
The news was also praised by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberal Party, who said the result marked “a great day for Australia.”
“We are an extraordinary nation. We have 23 million extraordinary Australians and we will benefit from China in a way that even the architects of the deal couldn’t have imagined,” the premier said.
The agreement with China had been widely controversial in Australia, particularly with some of the country’s major unions, sparking public protests and heated debates among legislators over whether the FTA would lead to job losses in Australia.
Government officials, for their part, had warned that a failure to pass the trade agreement in Parliament could lead to China walking away from the deal entirely. Delays in ratification, they added, could also be costly given the current schedule of tariff cuts in the deal. (See Bridges Weekly, 9 September 2015)
The negotiations for the trade deal, known otherwise as ChAFTA, were concluded last November after a decade of negotiations, with the deal then signed in June of this year. (See Bridges Weekly, 20 November 2014 and 25 June 2015, respectively)
