Towards a Chile-Australia Free Trade Agreement
Update: First round of negotiations
This first substantive round of Australia-Chile FTA negotiations was held in Canberra on 7 - 9 August. It was designed to build on the preliminary meetings held by the FTA teams in February and April in Santiago and, on that foundation, we were able to exchange quite a lot of text prior to the meeting and make solid progress on much of that text when we got together. The Chileans sent a large delegation (from at least 7 agencies) and engaged constructively on all issues. We had shared the drafting responsibility and draft texts based to some extent on Australia’s and Chile’s FTAs with the United States were tabled on all likely substantive chapters including Market Access for Goods, Cross Border Trade in Services, Investment, Government Procurement and Intellectual Property. The Chileans also tabled a comprehensive draft text on Cooperation, which is a great interest of theirs, for our consideration.
The discussions on the goods aspects of the agreement were positive, with significant progress made towards agreement on language covering, for example, issues like national treatment and market access. The discussions on rules of origin, technical barriers to trade, customs administration and sanitary and phytosanitary measures were also useful, with both sides generally in alignment on many of the key issues.
On services, the engagement was complex but constructive and encompassed discussion of chapters on Cross Border Trade in Services, Investment, Temporary Entry, Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce. Both sides agreed to exchange more information on each other’s regimes affecting trade in services to better facilitate progress at the next negotiating round.
Discussions on government procurement and competition policy were also positive but still have a way to go. As expected, the conversation on intellectual property (IP) was more challenging but we used the opportunity to reiterate to Chile the importance to Australia of including substantive, high quality IP provisions in our FTA.
Overall, the negotiations were productive. We have a similar approach to trade negotiations and share similar views on trade liberalisation. There are, of course, divergences in our respective policy approaches but both sides are keen to resolve these issues both inter-sessionally and at the next negotiating round. We hope that we will be able to discuss market access offers in goods, services and investment at our next meeting following some consultations with states and territories. We are working towards a date in mid-October for that meeting.