April 4, 2023: Clive Palmer is claiming $300 billion in an international tribunal to compensate for legislation passed by the Western Australian Parliament to remove his ability to extract damages from the state regarding the Balmoral South Iron Ore Project in the Pilbara. His claim has already failed in the High Court.
April 4, 2023: Foreign investor rights to sue government (Investor-State Dispute Settlement - ISDS), which was excluded from the recent Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement, will not apply between Australia and the UK when the UK joins the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
April 3, 2023: Australia’s Trade Minister Senator Don Farrell announced on March 31 that negotiations for the United Kingdom to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) were substantially concluded but that a draft Accession Protocol treaty instrument still had to be finalised.
March 28, 2023: The summaries of US inputs at the recent Bali round of negotiations for the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) reveal US pressure of the other 13 states to adopt US standards. At the same time the US Congress is yet to determine the IPEF agenda on the “digital economy”.
IPEF includes the US, Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Fiji and Vietnam.
March 21, 2023: The Times of India has reported that India issued termination notices to 68 countries for Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) with a request to renegotiate on the basis of the model agreement formulated in 2015.
March 20, 2023: DFAT has called for submissions for the Government’s Southeast Asia strategy 2040.
Despite the long-term time frame of the strategy, there is no reference so far to inequality in the region or to human rights, labour rights or environmental standards.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023: The People’s Vaccine Alliance issued a letter by 204 eminent global figures on March 11, the third anniversary of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO), calling for governments to act in four ways:
March 7, 2023: In November 2022, the Trade Minister confirmed Labor’s policy to exclude Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in new agreements and to review it in existing agreements. The policy was first adopted under the Gillard government in 2011 in response to community campaigning by AFTINET and others when the Philip Morris tobacco company sued the Australian government over our plain packaging law.
Monday March 6, 2023 : Over 400 US labor and civil society organisations have written to President Biden outlining their priorities for the pending <a href="http://aftinet.org.au/cms/Indo-pacific-economic-framework#overlay-contex... Economic Framework</a> (IPEF) trade agreement. <a href="https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/blog/2023/03/02/403-labor-and-civil-so... letter</a> comes shortly before the Office of the US Trade Representative is expected to introduce US proposals for IPEF’s labor, environment and digital trade chapters during a key negotiating round being held in Bali, Indonesia, on March 13-19.
Media Release February 27, 2023
World Health Organisation (WHO) member governments will meet in Geneva this evening AEDT to start debating a draft Pandemic Treaty intended to learn from the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and develop better strategies for future pandemics, to be completed in 2024.
Leading public health, fair trade, church, human rights and aid and development organisations have written to the Ministers responsible for Health, Foreign Affairs and Trade asking them not to repeat the “catastrophic moral failure” of inequitable global access to COVID vaccines, treatments and tests. The letter is attached. Quotes from organisation leaders are below.