Eleven years ago I was working at the Australian Treasury as the Department’s trade analyst, where I watched in disbelief as the former trade minister under the Howard Government, Mark Vaile, signed Australia up the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA).
Although signed with much fanfare, the AUSFTA was a dog of a deal. It failed miserably to free up US agricultural protection, included costly extensions to Australian patent and copyright terms, and introduced complex product-specific rules-of-origin that numbered in the hundreds of pages.
