If the free-trade deal clinched in Washington at the weekend between Australia and the US was simply about reducing import tariffs to zero, hundreds of officials wouldn't have needed thousands of hours to negotiate it.
Nor would the draft document that enshrined it run to 500 pages.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The free-trade agreement (FTA), which covers imports and exports last year worth US$28 billion and which needs the nod of parliaments in Canberra and Washington to become law, was about putting preferential treatment into the terms of trade between Australia and its leading investor, its principal business partner and its staunch ally and friend.
There were always going to be winners and losers. When the terms were revealed, manufacturers in the US were stoked while farmers and sugarcane growers in Australia were choked. And the draft document was always going to reflect that fact that Australia's economy is about 5 percent of the size of its biggest trade partner.
Australia's agricultural sector, now just 5 percent of Australia's economy, gets less favorable treatment than the country's faster growing sectors like the automotive industry, professional services and the film business.
When Canberra said categorically there could be no deal unless its sugarcane farmers got a bigger slice of the American market, Washington didn't blink -- and sugar got left out of the deal.
Prime Minister John Howard decided long ago that an FTA with the US -- any FTA with the US -- was in Australia's best interests.
After agreeing with US President George W. Bush in the middle of last year to thrash one out, he scoffed at those who said that a better bet would have been to snuggle up to Japan, or China, or the South East Asian nations on Australia's doorstep.
"Anybody who suggests that by seeking to forge this great economic partnership with the United States, we are locking ourselves into a declining relationship, a relationship of the 20th century rather than the 21st century, could not be more fatally misreading the future destiny and future opportunities of this country," Howard declared.
Paul Keating, Howard's immediate predecessor as prime minister, correctly predicted that most of the immediately discernible benefits of the deal would go to the US.
Arguing along with others for multilateral agreements forged in the granite halls of the World Trade Organization rather than bilateral ones bargained over in smoke-filled rooms, Keating opined that "back-door, back-lane agreements never work in trade -- they are always for the stronger party."
less than perfect
Even those who pushed for an FTA, like Australian Chamber of Commerce chief executive Peter Hendy, admit that the agreement leaves much to be desired.
But Hendy says that it is worthwhile putting a solid floor under the trading relationship.
"You can build from there, for those industries that don't think they've done so well at the initial stage," he said.
While the Labor Party, which hopes to unseat Howard's conservative Liberals in a general election likely to be called later this year, has warned that it might vote down the draft FTA when it comes up for ratification in the Canberra parliament, the consensus is that FTA will make it on to the statute book.
The groups that are against it -- sugarcane growers and dairy farmers, unions and far-left zealots -- are more than balanced by the industrial lobbies and others in favor.
"The agreement will provide massive opportunities for Australian companies of all sizes to gain access to the world's largest market," enthused Hugh Morgan, the president of the Business Council of Australia.
He notes that local businesses will now get a crack at a government procurement market across the Pacific worth US$270 billion a year.
Morgan also notes that the US didn't get all its own way, bending to Australia on issues ranging from local content on television, subsidies on medicines, the vetting of foreign investments and protection for clothing and textiles and other hard-pressed sundown labor-intensive industries.
Howard has already begun campaigning for the free-trade agreement, seeking to defend his concessions and forge unity across the political spectrum to support the deal. One of his first moves was to promise government assistance for sugar cane farmers.
"This has been achieved without the government compromising despite enormous pressure from the Americans," he said.
While there will be many who doubt the veracity of that claim, the betting is that most Australians will come round to Howard's view that getting hitched to the US economy is in their country's best interests.
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