The TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) is an agreement that has no end point, once it’s enacted, that’s it, we’re stuck with it. It was originally a trade agreement between New Zealand, Brunei and Chile with Australia, America, Malaysia, Peru, Japan and Vietnam getting in on the action a little later.

It is being negotiated in secret by “interested” parties (corporate stooges & Government Lobbyists) bypassing our parliament and in turn our democracy, International treaties are conducted by the executive, parliament does not have an effective say in this process until the deal is done, we the public don’t get to see the the text until it is concluded and signed off by cabinet, and even then they have a four year window in which they don’t have to release the text the public.

The TPP will stop our Government from being able regulate industries such as mining, tobacco and pharmaceutical in ways that could hurt the profits of corporations or from funding projects that other companies see as giving said company an unfair advantage. We don’t know a great deal about it as you would expect from something being kept a secret, but a recent leak from Wikileaks revealed officials really don’t expect to gain any agricultural benefit from the TPP. Increasing intellectual property rights in the TPP would undermine access to affordable medicines in Australia and the other participating countries, which include some of the world’s poorest countries. This would present a major setback to efforts to stem the tide of non-communicable diseases, which are predicted by the World Health Organisation to account for 73% of deaths and 60% of the global burden of disease by 2020.

If negotiations are successful it will guarantee foreign investors an enormous range of rights including the right to take the Australian Government to a private international arbitration court for millions of dollars in damages if they were to regulate in ways that reduce the profitability and value of their investment.

To give you an idea of who’s pulling the strings in these negotiations is the latest news that a bunch of big companies who employ some of the key lobbyists supporting the extreme nature of TPP on Feb 24th hosted a fancy, expensive dinner in Washington DC. The dinner was sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce, Philip Morris, Chevron, PhRMA, Microsoft, Pfizer, Amgen, Dow Chemical, among others… and the ambassadors from the TPP countries were all in attendance.

TPP is being called a Free Trade Agreement but it has very little to do with trade or economics, it is little more than a US led counterpoint to China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

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