Towards a Chile-Australia Free Trade Agreement
Update: Second round of negotiations
The second round of Australia-Chile Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations was held from 8-12 October in Santiago. Good progress was made across all areas of the agreement and the discussions were undertaken in a spirit of cooperation and flexibility.
Conditional goods market access offers were exchanged with both sides demonstrating their commitment to a strong, liberalising outcome. It is only the beginning of the process, however, and we will be focussing our efforts now on formulating specific requests to ensure that our key trade interests are addressed satisfactorily. The final Australian offer on tariff elimination will depend on the extent to which Chile responds positively to our requests.
Both sides had intended also to exchange services and investment offers. The Chileans were not quite ready to exchange, however, so we agreed to postpone that process and the exchange has occurred intersessionally. There were plenty of other issues to discuss during the services and investment sessions, so it was not significant that the formal offers were delayed by a few weeks.
Although the discussions were conducted in a spirit of cooperation, there are some key areas of divergence between the two sides which will need some serious work. These areas include intellectual property (although the discussions took that set of issues forward considerably), services market access, investment, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, government procurement and competition policy. We intend to work hard to close those gaps while maximising the value of the agreement for Australian business.
We have agreed to split the next round, in order to work around the holiday season in each country. Some of the Chilean team will come to Canberra in early December to pursue the goods negotiations and most of the other issues around goods, including government procurement. The remainder of the team will visit in late January to further the negotiations across services and investment and any of the other issues not covered in December.