I have spent years outlining the problems of free trade agreements (FTAs), which I learned while working as the Australian Treasury’s trade analyst and informally participating in discussions for the Australian-US FTA (AUSFTA).
The first pitfall is that Australia’s FTAs were mostly negotiated in secret from the public, but opened to corporations and industry groups to lobby for their interests.
The issues were most acute in non-trade areas such as intellectual property, Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), and labour market access, where companies’ interests are most distant from citizens.
