The protests in Seattle
should help dispel the carefully cultivated Australian
myth that the World Trade Organisation negotiations are
basically about agriculture.
Further tariff reductions
in six industrial sectors, including the car industry,
are proposed at the WTO by the APEC countries. Moreover,
the WTO process is increasingly aimed at limiting the
capacity of governments to regulate the economy to meet
social, environmental and employment objectives.
One of the core free-trade
principles of the WTO is that of national treatment, which
requires a country to treat foreign companies and providers
and their capital, goods and services identically to their
local counterparts, broadly defined.
According to this
principle laws specifying minimum Australian content for
our television programs constitute an unfair trade barrier.
So too does any local supplier preference provision in
government tendering processes and ceilings on foreign
equity in companies.
The WTO’s Council
for Trade in Services has identified government subsidies
to public universities, hospitals etc. as measures which
distort free trade in those services unless the subsidies
are equally available to foreign and domestic private
providers. The extent and scope of free trade resulting
from anyone WTO negotiating round depends both on political
considerations and horse-trading between countries but
incrementally the WTO process is enshrining economic rationalist
policies on a global scale. To dismiss the Seattle protesters
as defending an obsolete national sovereignty in the era
of globalisation is to miss the point. The WTO model of
free trade restricts the legislative and regulatory capacity
of democratic institutions whether they be local councils,
national parliaments or supranational assemblies such
as the European Union parliament. The issue of the balance
of power between governments and the so-called free-trade
"rights" of transnational corporations requires
urgent debate.
TED MURPHY
National Assistant Secretary
National Tertiary Education Union
South Melbourne, Vic
