ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand FTA
Subscriber Update
Update 14 - August 2007
Tenth Round of Negotiations
The 10th meeting of the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (FTA) trade negotiating committee took place in Perth from 31 July – 4 August 2007.
Overall, useful progress was made across most of the negotiating agenda, with the customs procedures chapter finalised and a number of other chapters close to finalisation. We progressed market access negotiations through exchanging initial services offers and Australia’s initial investment offer, noting that they were subject to ongoing consultations with States and Territories. Australia also put forward initial tariff requests to ASEAN countries, identifying key areas where we are looking for early tariff elimination.
The Perth round brought into sharper focus the obstacles to be overcome if we are to conclude a comprehensive FTA that is commercially credible. The focus is now on trying to determine the level of ambition for the market access outcomes in goods, services and investment.
On goods, continued progress was made in the negotiations. Differences between ASEAN and Australia and New Zealand in the phasing-in of commitments by ASEAN to reduce and eliminate tariffs on the Normal Track (NT) lists covering 90% of tariff lines were narrowed. Key outstanding issues that the negotiators are now seeking to resolve are the timeframes for eliminating all NT tariffs and the extent to which tariffs in the Sensitive Track (ST) of the remaining 10% of tariff lines will be eliminated.
Consideration of the draft chapter on Trade in Goods is still at an early stage, but follow-up work has been agreed to expedite work on this chapter at the next meeting. The chapters covering sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, and standards, technical regulations and conformity assessment (TBT) were progressed, with a limited number of issues left to be addressed.
The working group on rules of origin (ROO) made useful progress on drafting provisions for administrative arrangements supporting certification and verification. The group continued its work considering the detailed product specific rules (PSRs) that will set the ROO for individual product, but much detailed work remains to be done in this area.
Negotiations on services made modest progress, with initial services offers exchanged with all ASEAN countries. However, ASEAN offers fell well below our expectation of a “substantial improvement” on their WTO commitments. While there was good ASEAN engagement on financial services, their engagement on our text on movement of natural persons, telecommunications and electronic commerce remains limited.
On investment, Australia and Singapore tabled their draft initial offers. New Zealand and other ASEAN6* confirmed their intention to submit initial offers by September and Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV) by December. There was constructive discussion on the draft chapter text and some progress was made in narrowing the differences on some of the outstanding issues.
Economic cooperation negotiations made rapid progress, with the chapter text now near finalisation. The focus now is on operationalising the work program by developing projects that will support the implementation of the FTA.
There was constructive discussion on legal and institutional issues, and steady progress was made in tidying up the dispute settlement chapter. Intellectual property gathered momentum with all parties (except Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam) bringing their intellectual property experts to the Perth meeting. This paved the way for detailed and constructive discussion on the draft intellectual property text tabled by Australia and New Zealand. On special and differential treatment, it was agreed that a separate chapter in the FTA was not necessary. ASEAN is yet to engage on government procurement and competition policy.
The next meeting is scheduled to take place in Kuala Lumpur from 24 – 28 September 2007. The ASEAN Economic Ministers and CER Trade Ministers will be meeting in late August to assess prospects for concluding substantive negotiations by end-2007.
* Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
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