21 March 2016

Watch as AFTINET’s Dr Patricia Ranald explains the TPP, it’s potential impact on public education and other public interest legislation, and what you can do about it.

17 March 2016:

JSCOT has an important role in scrutinising our trade agreements, but it is very limited, because the committee does not see the text until after the decision to sign it is made by Cabinet, and cannot change it.

16 March 2016

The era of free trade might be over and that's a good thing, writes Jared Bernstien for the New York Times.

It's a good thing, he argues, because FTAs had "long devolved into handshakes between corporate and investor interests on both sides of the border, allowing little voice for working people."

Read the full article here

14 March 2016

Voters in the US are beginning to understand that recent so-called “free" trade deals like the TPP are increasingly written for the interests of large global corporations - at the expense of ordinary working people.

14 March 2016

New Australian Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has told The Australian that he wants Parliament to vote on the TPP’s implementing legislation before the next election is held.

12 March 2016

Consumer advocacy group Choice has launched a new campaign to 'get rid of the devil in the detail' of the TPP.

Chief executive Alan Kirkland told Fairfax Media that the TPP opens the Australian government to being sued by foreign companies for changes to food labelling and product safety laws.

9 March 2016

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the US elections you have probably heard that all the leading candidates are opposed to the TPP (albeit for very different reasons).

So what does it mean for the agreement if the main US presidential candidates don’t support it?

Let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios.

3 March 2016

Economics Editor for The Age Peter Martin has questioned whether Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull - or anyone else for that matter - would mind if the TPP "fell over". 

He argues that economic modelling finds the benefits of the deal for Australia to be "almost non existent," criticises DFAT's National Interest Analysis for "merely summarising" the deal, and accuses leaders of "willful blindness." 

26 February 2016

This week the World Trade Organisation put a road block in the way of India’s efforts to invest in renewable energy while creating jobs for its people.

According to Grist, the WTO dispute panel ruled that aspects of India’s National Solar Mission - which require a proportion of the solar cells to be manufactured in India - were “inconsistent” with international trade norms and therefore prohibited.

26 February 2016

The CEO of Disney has boasted of influencing the intellectual property chapter of the TPP in a letter to his employees.