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| Changing their tune |
22-Feb-2005 |
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Opinion by Dr Andrew Gunn
TSUNAMIS aren’t the only grounds for muted New Year’s celebrations.
One January 2005 marked Year Zero for 1100 pages of legalese — the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUS-FTA). Presumably even lawyers can’t understand it, otherwise both sides wouldn’t insist they got the better deal.
I was introduced to international trade issues and a bunch of new acronyms in 2001. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) wanted to dampen concerns about the World Trade Organisation (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). GATS commits us to “progressive liberalisation” of services. That is, the incremental, irreversible opening to international businesses of our markets in services such as, say, health care.
Trade treaties on services work by restricting a government’s ability to regulate. They redistribute power from national governments to international corporations, which can have annual turnovers larger than a moderate-sized country’s gross domestic product.
DFAT held public consultations on GATS to ease disquiet. They backfired.
Non-government organisation representatives entered meetings open-minded about trade treaties, and left thinking our government officials were ignorant or evasive, or maybe both.
When confronted about Australia’s health care commitments, senior bureaucrats initially dismissed questions about inclusion in GATS of any health-related service as “scaremongering”.
Then they admitted that podiatry and chiropody had been signed off. Interestingly, in the US, podiatry includes orthopaedic surgery to the foot. The potential implications of this so far seem to have escaped our politicians, bureaucrats and orthopods.
Our democracy-of-sorts deems certain information as too sensitive for the plebs. Nonetheless, the occasional nugget gets uncovered. One discovery has been that the Keating Labor government signed off on dental services and health insurance in 1994. This commitment to progressive liberalisation of our dental services was made via the inclusion of a cross within a table buried deep in the business services section of GATS documentation.
Dentistry is listed under business services, not under health, and DFAT only ever claimed that our health commitments were limited to podiatry and chiropody. Signing off dentistry in GATS means that any expansion of public dental cover could open a door to legal action from disadvantaged international providers.
The GATS experience didn’t boost confidence in the likely perspicacity of our AUS-FTA negotiators. But we’re told these trade treaties are inevitable. Ever notice how, when advocates have no better argument, they describe something as inevitable?
During the secret AUS-FTA talks, the government repeatedly said that pharmaceuticals and the PBS were “not on the table”. Then aggressive US attempts to change our drug pricing and PBS listing process were revealed. Drug companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying politicians to do just this.
But according to our Trade Minister Mr Mark Vaile, our negotiators “successfully defended our interests”, keeping the “status quo” with only “minor” changes. Now — surprise, surprise — even before the ink is dry, the US is threatening legal action over amendments on generics and the cost of drugs. US Congressmen inform us that below-market-rate pharmaceutical prices deny Australians access to the latest drugs. Drug industry representatives say measures to protect the PBS set undesirable international precedents.
I’m not anti-American — hey, I own every Ramones album — but this FTA is a worry.
Bob Menzies kowtowed to the British, but at least he could plead distraction by a youthful queen. As for our current PM? Go figure.
Dr Gunn is a GP in Brisbane.
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