The TPP is Back: Submission to Australian Parliamentary Inquiries

[Update of 22 August 2018: the JSCOT Report No 181 recommending CPTPP ratification is now available. It refers to this Submission, my oral evidence given at hearings in Sydney (transcribed here), and further statistical information jointly with PhD student Ana Ubilava (incorporated also into an article for the Sept 2018 issue of the Intl Arb L Rev).]
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was signed in February 2016 by Australia, Japan, the US and 9 other Asia-Pacific countries, but the new Trump Administration withdrew signature in January 2017, so the remaining 11 re-signed a variant (TPP11 or CPTPP) in March 2018. Inquiries into ratification are now being conducted by the the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT, where the Government always had a majority of members, so will almost certainly recommend ratification) and the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee in the Senate (where the Government lacks a majority overall). The Inquiry reports do not bind the Government anyway, so the big question remains: will the opposition Labour Party subsequently vote with the Government to enact tariff reductions consistently with this treaty, to allow the Government then to ratify the treaty so it can come into force?
A particular stumbling block will remain the TPP11’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions, given as an option additional to inter-state arbitration for investors directly to enforce substantive commitments offered by host states to protect foreign investment, given that the Labour Party’s policy remains opposed to including ISDS in treaties. Despite that policy position, going back to the the Gillard Government Trade Policy Statement in 2011 (in force until Labour lost power in 2013), the Labour Opposition nonetheless voted pragmatically with the Government to allow FTAs containing ISDS to come into force with Korea and China.
Below is my Submission to both Parliamentary Committees, focusing on the investment chapter and supporting ratification of the TPP11. It is based in part on my latest paper with A/Prof Amokura Kawharu focusing on recent ISDS cases and investment treaties (re)negotiated by Australia, and New Zealand where a new Labour Government has also renounced ISDS for future treaties, but pragmatically agreed to rather minimal changes to ISDS and the investment chapter overall in TPP11. The footnoted original versions of the Submission, available by the Committee websites, refer to some of my other recent writings concluding a 4-year ARC cross-institutional research project on international investment dispute management. One is a 21-chapter book on ‘International Investment Treaties and Arbitration Across Asia‘, launched by former Chief Justice Robert French on Thursday 13 April as part of a SCIL-supported symposium on international commercial dispute resolution, including Australian perspectives.

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