Norman Russel: Fighting Foreign Corporate Control Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Fighting Foreign Corporate Control Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5258. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Green): I rise to speak in support of this bill about essentially outlawing investor-State disputes clauses in future trade agreements. I thought that perhaps the simplest way to come into this would be to quote at length from The Economist about exactly this issue which has attracted a lot of attention. The Economist wrote on 11 October 2014 and it said: “If you wanted to convince the public that international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people this is what you would do: give foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever a government passes a law to say discourage smoking protect the environment or prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yet that is precisely what thousands of trade and investment treaties … have done through a process known as ‘investor-state dispute settlement’ or ISDS.” That is from The Economist magazine talking about investor-State dispute settlements.It goes on to say: “ISDS first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement between Germany and Pakistan in 1959. The intention was to encourage foreign investment by protecting investors from discrimination or expropriation. But the implementation of this laudable idea has been disastrous. … Multinationals”—this is The Economist magazine speaking—“have exploited woolly definitions of expropriation to claim compensation for changes in government policy that happen to have harmed their business. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 for instance the German government decided to shut down its nuclear power industry. Soon after Vattenfall a Swedish utility that operates two nuclear plants in Germany demanded compensation of [over NZ$5 billion] under the ISDS clause of a treaty … This claim is still in arbitration.” But as The Economist says “it is just one of a growing number of such cases … In 2012 a record 59 [of these cases] were started; last year [there were] 56 … The highest award so far is [for US$2.3 billion] to Occidental an oil company against the government of Ecuador” because the Government of Ecuador apparently lawfully terminated an oil-concession contract.That is from The Economist magazine hardly renowned for its radical anti-business perspective on trade agreements. And what The Economist magazine and establishment figures all around the world are now doing is stopping progress on these kinds of clauses because they are so fundamentally dangerous to democracy and to regulation-making by Governments. That is why The Economist went to some length to explain the problems and the dangers with investor-State dispute settlement clauses which allow multinational corporations to sue Governments if Governments regulate in a way that costs those companies money.Think about the German nuclear industry. Germany is not renowned for having a Wild West legal structure yet Germany decided after the Fukushima disaster that it no longer wanted to pursue nuclear power and it would slowly phaseout nuclear power. It is now facing an investor-State dispute settlement case of around $5 billion that it may have to pay in order to proceed with that perfectly sensible policy. Australia is facing a case because it wants plain packaging on tobacco and Philip Morris rightfully says “That will cause us harm or damage our business.” Well that is true it will but it will save thousands and thousands of lives. South Africa faced similar cases when it tried to tackle apartheid.What the lawyer for—and I think this is really interesting—the nuclear power company Vattenfall Kai Hobar said when he was asked about the case he was taking against the German Government on behalf of the nuclear power utility company was: “States are complaining about this but they’ve signed up to these treaties themselves. If they don’t want them don’t sign them.” Those are the words from the lawyer who is suing the German Government because the German Government is phasing out nuclear power a case that could cost it $5 billion. That lawyer is right: if we do not want these do not sign them and that is what this legislation does.