Peter Gallagher

ASEAN accounts for just under 20 per­cent of Australia’s trade ($81bn in 20087–8), so the ASEAN-Aus­tralia-New Zealand Free Trade Agree­ment (AANZFTA) that has now been sub­mit­ted to par­lia­ments for rat­i­fi­ca­tion is poten­tial­ly a big deal.

How big it is dif­fi­cult to say from a quick review. This is an exten­sive agree­ment with a lot of details that will take care­ful eval­u­a­tion. It is appar­ent­ly the most ambi­tious and lib­er­al FTA the ASEAN coun­tries have ever signed with non-Mem­bers. It seems to be much more ambi­tious than their deals with Chi­na or Japan.

But the Agree­ment has a num­ber of excep­tions in the goods chap­ters in Indone­sia, for exam­ple, and some very-long imple­men­ta­tion hori­zons for poten­tial­ly impor­tant trad­ing part­ners such such as Viet­nam that could reduce its com­mer­cial val­ue. The ser­vices chap­ter seems to offer some use­ful but not-exten­sive improve­ments in access to the strong­ly pro­tect­ed mar­kets of ASEAN (pro­fes­sion­al, legal, account­ing ser­vices chiefly) and there are some mod­est improve­ments in move­ments of essen­tial per­son­nel (most­ly by Australia/NZ).

The ‘fact sheets’ pro­duced by DFAT pro­vide sum­maries that are a good place start with the eval­u­a­tion. Below, an extract that seems to me to be among the high­lights: a sum­ma­ry table of show­ing the per­cent­age of Australia’s base peri­od (2005) goods exports that will be duty-free by the end of the imple­men­ta­tion peri­od (2025 in some cas­es) and in three inter­ven­ing years.