For those interested, I appeared briefly on ABC’s The Business yesterday where I questioned the merits of Australia’s free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations, in particular the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is likely to be inked in the next few weeks.
In the segment, I make the following comments about the TPP and FTAs:
“The whole agreement [the TPP] has been conducted in secret, even industry groups and not-for-profits have not been involved”.
“There are around 20 chapters [in the TPP] that are likely to be released and we have only received two draft chapters – and they were leaked by Wikileaks. So we really don’t know what is in it and, what we do know, it does look detrimental”…
“I think they [FTAs] are mostly picture opportunities”.
“The studies that have been released so far have shown that they [FTAs] have provided very minimal benefits and the reason for that is the cost of complying with the rules of origin are actually quite high.”
My views on the TPP have been fleshed-out in dozens of articles over the past 18 months (for example here and here), whereas my views of FTAs more generally are articulated here.
