May 29, 2026: Australian and 10 other member governments are reviewing and negotiating changes to the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). 

April 17, 2026: Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting is suing Canada over a rejected coal mine, in the third investor-state dispute under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) since it came into force in 2018.

January 20, 2026: DFAT called for these submissions as part of its Southeast Asian strategy to broaden and diversify trade relations in the region.The AFTINET submission advocates for the need to assert alternatives to Trump coercive trade policies and comments broadly about what should be included and excluded from trade agreements. The government should implement its policy on including commitments to UN and ILO agreements, including women’s and Indigenous peoples’ rights, labour rights and environmental standards in trade agreements and on excluding ISDS, expansion of medicine monopolies and restrictions on government regulation of the digital domain. Read the full submission here.

October 7, 2025: Costa Rica has applied for membership of the  12-member Comprehenisve and Progressice Trans-Pacific Partnesup, which does include investor rights to sue governments ( ISDS). The memgbership is in the process of being negotiated bilaterally with all current CPTPP member governments. Australian government policy is to exclude ISDS from new agreements and review it in existing agreements, becuase it restricts gvoernment regulation in the public interest, including action to reduce carbon emissions. 

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (CPTPP), a free trade agreement between 11 countries; Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam, has now been in force for 5 years. This milestone means the CPTPP has to undergo a 5-year post-implementation review, which considers the impacts of the agreement since it has come into force.

May 31, 2023: The Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement (A-UK FTA), negotiated and signed by the Morrison Coalition government, came into force today, with the lazy media reporting about its apparently wonderful benefits. Two Melbourne University academics, Professor Margaret Young and Georgina Clough, analysed its impacts on climate change policy in The Conversation, and found it wanting.

April 18, 2023: At the end of March, the 11 members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) agreed to admit the UK to the deal, but the text of the conditions of entry will not become public until after it is signed later this year. There is widespread criticism of this move in the UK, and the British Journal of Medicine has spelt out the concerns on public health.

The existing 11 members of the CPTPP are Australia, New Zealand Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam. The UK will be the 12^th. China and Taiwan have also applied to join.

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).

The UK government has now published an explanatory document which confirms that “In light of the investment relationship the UK has with Australia and New Zealand, we have agreed to disapply the ISDS provisions in CPTPP between our countries.”