Towards a Chile-Australia Free Trade Agreement
Update: Third round of negotiations
It was agreed with Chile that the third round of negotiations would be split, in order to accommodate the different holiday seasons in each country and inevitable staff absences. The first half of the round took place in Canberra in the week of 10 December and covered mostly goods issues. The rest of the Chilean team came to Canberra in the last week of January to continue negotiations on the services, investment and intellectual property issues.
The December sessions made important progress on goods and related issues. Goods, customs, technical barriers to trade (TBT), sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS) and competition policy texts are substantially agreed – in several cases only one issue remains outstanding before those texts can be put aside until the end of the negotiations. A lot of time at this session was spent on government procurement and on rules of origin (ROO). Important progress was made on each. The group worked on product specific rules of origin for two days and achieved much, but more work remains to be done. The government procurement group spent three days resolving some thorny issues but, like the ROOs group, still have a way to go. Australia intends to refine the government procurement text intersessionally and will also need to consult with State and Territory governments, and other Commonwealth agencies, to ensure that they are comfortable with likely provisions. We began detailed discussions on dispute settlement and other legal issues and Australia and Chile each agreed to draft some of the necessary provisions for the next round.
The goods market access negotiations were positive – while the process is not over and the detail is confidential between governments at this stage, we have made a promising start and both sides are committed to a strong, liberalising outcome. Each of us does have sensitivities, however, so each will be concentrating on ensuring that our key trade interests are addressed satisfactorily.
The Chilean services and investment and intellectual property teams travelled to Canberra in the week of 28 January to engage with their counterparts here. Those are particularly complex subjects and some very intense negotiations over several very long days resulted. Chile sent a widely-representative team and Australia’s own delegation included officers from DFAT, the Attorney General’s Department, Treasury, Customs, the Industry Department, the Departments of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, of Immigration and Citizenship and of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.
Some important progress was made in the session. Australia tabled a basic text for a cooperation chapter, an inclusion in the Agreement to which Chile attaches a deal of importance. Our willingness to talk about such a chapter was an important step forward and was well received by the Chilean negotiators. For its part, Chile indicated some flexibility on a couple of key services and investment issues that, until then, had been quite problematic. The conversation is not over, but it is heading in the right direction. The intellectual property team made steady progress, with considerable work remaining.
Although there is still a lot to be done, both sides have acknowledged that the end of these negotiations is in sight. We have made substantial progress in a relatively very short period and it is possible, but not certain, that the negotiations could be finalised in the next few months. We have scheduled intersessional meetings in both Chile and Australia in early March and plan to hold the fourth round in Santiago early in April. .
The March intersessionals involve the Chileans sending a small group of negotiators to Canberra. Agreeing on product specific schedules for Rules of Origin is a very labour intensive and time consuming task and it is vital that the negotiators have enough time to work through the tariff schedules. We will have an opportunity, in the margins of that meeting, to try and move the goods negotiations on as well. We also hope to agree on substantial areas of text on general provisions and dispute settlement. A few of our services and investment negotiators will travel to Santiago in the same week to push forward on as many areas as possible, including financial services (where progress has been slow to date), telecommunications and movement of persons. The IP and government procurement negotiators are considering video and telephone conferencing as a way of moving closer to agreement on those chapters.