Senator BROWN (4:33 PM) —In the three minutes I have got, I want to make a couple of very salient points. The first is that this multilateral agreement on investment is being driven not by governments or the OECD, but by the multinational corporations themselves. The process began in the late 1950s but it became reality in 1995, when the 20 or so OECD nations—and at that time Australia was represented by the then Labor government, the Keating government—went into a secret convocation in Europe, which has proceeded ever since. That secret convocation was to give strength and international law to the interests of the multinational corporations and their shareholders, as against the interests of sovereign nations and the people of those nations. It is nothing short of a transfer of power from the parliament and the government—which, in the case of Australia, is elected by the people of Australia—to multinational corporations. That has been done in secret under, first, the Labor government and now a Liberal government.

Senator Kemp had the audacity to come in here and say that he had not heard from me. I asked him a series of questions on this very issue in May last year, and the answers he gave were—to use a word from Senator Schacht who has just left—obfuscation. He did say that the Australian government endorsed an MAI and it would strengthen the framework for international investment flows. He has changed his tune now because, suddenly, there is a public debate. Suddenly, he says that it is going to be up to the national interest. He is adding a few caveats to it, but there were none of those in May last year.

Moreover, in that answer in May last year, Senator Kemp indicated that, if it were not signed in May—that is, with no public debate—a new date would be set soon after that. As Senator Margetts said, that new date was to have been December. No public debate. No flagging of this issue by either Labor, which began it, or the coalition, which carried it through. It took a small program on the ABC late last year called Background Briefing to make this a national story. It was pushed along by community groups concerned about this issue in this country and elsewhere—not by the multinationals, the big parties or this government, but by community groups and a small, investigative and community minded ABC program.

Suddenly, this has become an issue. One of the reasons it is getting a bigger run from the press gallery is that the Labor Party is having second thoughts. It is not an issue when the two parties agree. It is an issue when they disagree. I believe that is not good enough and the media has lost the ball on this as well. The public ought to have been informed earlier. The questions being asked a year ago ought to have been followed up in the media, but they were not. That says something about the way the government treats the people of this country. (Time expired)