The almost Kafkaesque secrecy surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement — secret if you’re not a large US corporation that has been given privileged confidential access to the treaty drafts by US trade authorities — reached a new height yesterday. Australian MPs were offered access to the treaty on the basis that they didn’t take notes and wouldn’t reveal what they saw for four years.
Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson refused to accept the terms and was thus unable to view the document. He was correct to do so.
The TPP will almost certainly damage Australia’s interests. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has carriage of the secret negotiation of the treaty and which has fiercely resisted the most basic transparency in relation to it, has previously negotiated trade outcomes that directly harm Australia. The Productivity Commission, for example, found that the intellectual property provisions of the Australia-US free trade agreement were economically harmful to Australia. DFAT cannot be trusted to negotiate on intellectual property matters. It has sold out Australia’s interests before and can be relied on to do so again. And then there is the potentially enormously damaging impact of investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms, which will empower multinational corporations to seek to block any change in government policy that deem to be problematic — as if the world’s biggest corporations didn’t already have enough influence over governments.
The secrecy surrounding this attack on Australia’s national interest is utterly unacceptable — and all the more so given corporations have been given access to drafts of the TPP. Politicians who agreed to the conditions of access have colluded in this secrecy.
Our best information on the TPP has come from WikiLeaks, which has provided three leaked copies of very segments of the draft text. At the moment, WikiLeaks is crowdsourcing a US$100,000 bounty for the current draft of the treaty. The WikiLeaks effort deserves support. The more this noxious treaty is exposed to scrutiny, the clearer it will be that it is inimical to the interests of countries like Australia.
So, this is what democracy has come to? We have to crowdfund a bribe to get access to a trade agreement that is supposedly good for Australia? This makes me so sad.
If the TPP were truly beneficial for all participating countries, it should be able to sell itself based purely on merit alone. If only governments could view the contents, I might be a little more understanding of the secrecy, but corporations are allowed to read the contents as well. This is wrong on so many levels.
Excellent summary of a toxic and grossly undemocratic process. The major media outlets, including the ABC, have been scandalously negligent in not adequately scrutinising these negotiations and demanding greater transparency. The Federal Opposition has also failed to do its job as scrutineer of DFAT and its political masters.
Excellent work, Crikey. Please make the editorial available online so we can link to all & sundry.
When will the Australian government stop behaving like Uriah Heep whenever the shadow of the USA looms?
In an article republished in Independent Australia, 27 May 2015 (via Common Dreams), the author, Dave Johnson, has this to say:
“Stop calling the TPP a ‘trade’ agreement. The TPP is a corporate/investor rights agreement. Trade is a good thing – the TPP is not.”
And there is a whole lot of other stuff in this article as well, but that quote pretty well sums up what is going on with the TPP.
Somehow, we have to stop this odious government from signing away Australia’s sovereign rights – and our future!
It’s time these untrustworthy corporations were either banned or nationalised to stop such blatant abuse of people’s rights.