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The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement - An Exercise in Treachery

The TPP is described as a trade pact, but what is it in reality?

Very little of the TPP deals with the specifics of trading relations, and of the sections that do, most will produce a trend to domination and monopoly rather than open competition.  It will not promote free trade.

The World Bank says that the TPP will boost trade by less than 0.7% and that will be by 2025.

US President Obama is a strong supporter of the TPP, but both leading Democrat and Republican Presidential candidates in the 2016 US elections have said they do not support the Treaty because it threatens jobs in the US and would allow the US government to be sued by foreign corporations.

The main effects of the TPP will be to empower global corporations and disempower elected governments through the secret "dispute settlement" process, extend copyright entitlements which will empower the monopolies that own intellectual property at the expense of competition, and eliminate the power of unions or governments to protect wages and conditions.  Thus it has more to do with social control and geopolitics than with freeing up trade and will severely limit the soveriegnty of participant countries and the democratic rights of the people who live in them.

 

If the TPP legislation is enacted by our Federal parliament, then all Australian governments will be subject to legal action if (for example) they take action to………

 

  • Set limits on the purchase price of medicines from pharmaceutical companies
  • Allow the prompt introduction of cheaper 'generic' medicines
  • Prevent the sale of GMO foods in Australia
  • Introduce advisory food labelling that has a detrimental effect on profits
  • Prevent the importation of foreign cheap labour to compete with local workers
  • Prevent fracking in any part of our country to protect ground water
  • Introduce Occupational Health & Safety regulations that cut into corporate profit

The second “trade” agreement – the Ageement in Trade and Services - we are expected to accept will require our taxes to be disbursed as subsidies to any foreign service (health, transport, education, etc) provider who sets up in Australia, and at a level that at least matches what we pay to our own schools, hospitals, medicare insurance, universities, aged care homes, public transport or other providers. We will wind up with the same pathetic levels of care and education as exist in the USA and be obliged to pay for it.

The Church has put a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties.

View other information sources.