On the face of it, not joining Free Trade Agreements does more harm than joining those that even cause pain. But the many FTAs done by Australia’s remarkably successful Trade Minister Andrew Robb have other objectives than merely seeking fairer trade deals. These unstated objectives are invariably submerged by the promised boost to trade (along with the threat of being left out against rivals who are in). These agreements, however, are getting less and less about significantly reducing the already diminished tariff walls of the world’s major trading nations and more and more about imposing supra-national legal requirements as the price of globalised club membership. No matter how it is dressed up, this represents a clear loss of national sovereignty, as my cantankerous successor as a Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan pointed out before avoiding voting for the China-Australia Free Trade agreement when it passed the Senate (with Labor support) last week. This deal clearly satisfied major diplomatic objectives, without detracting from its significant trade benefits. As Brendan Pearson, CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia said: ‘The trade agreement is a watershed moment in Australia’s economic history. Together with the trade agreements with Japan and Korea, ChAFTA will anchor the Australian economy in East Asia for many decades to come and will provide increased opportunity and prosperity for future generations of Australians’.

But if the threat to sovereignty was not a big enough issue to disrupt ChAFTA, it is a major problem in the two big game-changing negotiations currently involving the USA – the 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that includes Australia and Japan but not China, and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to join the US with the European Union in a huge market of more than 800,000 of the world’s richest consumers. The 150,000 Germans who protested in Berlin against the TTIP and the barrage on social media suggest that it could face problems. In Australia, this month’s release of previously secret TPP details has clearly indicated the importance of agendas other than lowering trade barriers. To supporters, like Sydney Law School’s Donald Robertson, ‘It is not about free trade for its own sake, but how it affects economic prosperity and promotes world peace and stability through ground-breaking reforms’ involving ‘a revolution in international commercial law and regulation… the TPP is part of a much broader move to reform the way in which international deals are done [in a globalised world] and disputes resolved… They are not restrictions on sovereignty but rules that enhance the ability of host states to engage in international trade’.

That is not how the critics see it. Unlike the ChAFTA experience, where the Labor leadership abandoned its initial endorsement of the union movement’s irrational opposition and voted for the enabling legislation, the TPP has prompted greater unease about loss of sovereignty in many of the 12 signatory nations. Its planned international commercial dispute settlement arrangements and the prevention of currency manipulation by governments would significantly undermine local authority. And its rules on intellectual property would benefit the US pharmaceutical industry and Hollywood. It will take great skill to translate the initial agreement into a formal treaty, even in the US itself, where the threat comes not only from organised labour and the political left, but also from free traders who are angry that TPP doesn’t go far enough. There is enough negativity across party lines to create problems for President Obama, with a majority of Democrats in Congress and up to 50 Republicans opposed to the TPP which has been described by the Wall Street Journal as not only a key part of Obama’s economic legacy but, more importantly, as ‘the centrepiece of his strategic shift towards Asia’. He sees it as helping the US play a bigger role in setting the rules in a region increasingly dominated by China, blogging that if Congress doesn’t pass this agreement and if America doesn’t write these rules, ‘then countries like China will’. These days, Free Trade Agreements are about a lot more than trade.