Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States was announced by the Prime Minister on 14 November 2002, we were—like the rest of Australia—sceptical, but openminded as to the outcome. We could see the benefits of being linked to the world’s largest economy, as long as it didn't preclude us from being linked to our many other trading partners as well. When successive statements were issued as to the progress of the negotiations, we were dismayed to find so little being publicly released by the Australian side, in contrast with the very public and accountable approach taken by the Americans. Our confidence was not raised by the release of phoney econometric estimates of the ‘benefits’ of the deal that were likely to flow to Australia, all of which took a very narrow approach to estimating such costs and benefits, purely in terms of market access. Like most Australians, we knew—that there would be more involved in the Agreement than such market access issues.
But we were completely taken by surprise when we discovered just how ‘comprehensive’ was the deal announced on February 8 this year (2004), and how comprehensively the Australian negotiators (or, more precisely, their political masters in government) had betrayed their own country. When the text of the agreement (all 1000 pages of it) was finally released, it was immediately apparent that the ‘trade’ part of the deal is anything but free—in so far as large areas of Australia’s most competitive exports, from sugar to fast ferries, continue to be banned or severely restricted in the US market. This is bad enough. But far worse is the fact that the agreement goes a very long way to dismantling some of Australia’s most precious national institutions, especially Quarantine and our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. It goes a long way to abandoning the means of protecting and consolidating our own assets and resources, through removing virtually all barriers to US investment (read: mergers and acquisitions of local assets).
