Labor and the Nationals have stepped-up pressure on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, which is in the final stages of negotiation.
Fearing the deal will raise significant costs to consumers and taxpayers, Labor spokewomen on trade, Penny Wong, and shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, have jointly called on the Government to have intellectual property rights urgently reviewed by the Productivity Commission prior to signing the agreement. From The AFR:
“The Abbott government must now bring forward this Productivity Commission review to ensure it has the latest evidence and analysis on intellectual property rights when negotiating this decade’s biggest trade deal,” Ms Wong and Mr Leigh said…
“Intellectual property issues are central to these negotiations, with key parties like the US government pursuing expanded IP rights for their major corporations,” Ms Wong and Mr Leigh said.
“We need a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in Australia’s current regime before the Abbott government agrees to any significant changes.
“We also need to set some benchmarks for protecting Australia’s national interest on intellectual property issues when our government goes to the negotiating table with other countries.”
Regular readers will know that the US is seeking further copyright extensions to make consumers in other countries pay more for films, computer games, and software (amongst other things). It also wants to defer access to cheaper generic drugs by “ever-greening” existing patents by claiming minor chemical changes constitute a new compound.
For these reasons, the Productivity Commission, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Harper competition review have all questioned the merits of including intellectual property in the TPP.
Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister, Barnaby Joyce, has backed his National Party colleagues who have warned they will refuse to support the TPP unless it opens up significant export opportunities for the sugar industry. From The Australian:
Mr Joyce, the deputy Nationals leader, said his American agricultural counterparts were offering “excuses’’ on sugar opportunities compared with Australia trying to accommodate their requests…
Mr Joyce said sugar was important to Australia.
“And what my colleagues are saying is what their constituents are saying to them,’’ he said…
“I said I wanted one thing: sugar, that’s it. And all we get is excuses,’’ he said.
Mr Joyce said the US produced seven million tonnes of sugar and consumed 10 million tonnes.
“We are not putting their producers out of a job. We just want a greater say in the part that they can’t produce for themselves,’’ Mr Joyce said.
As I keep warning, the Coalition looks set to make the same mistakes with the TPP as it made in negotiating the Australia-US FTA in 2004.
That is, signing onto a deal that imposes significant costs on Australia’s consumers, taxpayers, and our world-class health system by placing the interest of US pharmaceutical and digital companies ahead of our own, all the while the US fails to free up access to its markets for our farmers.
