Culture and Australia's negotiations under the DOHA round of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)

Australia's negotiations under the current round of GATS differ in some significant ways from the negotiation of the free trade agreement with the United States of America.

Whereas negotiations with the US are bilateral, with Australia very much the junior and aspiring partner, GATS negotiations are multilateral, with agreements potentially among all member nations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Australia could be under more pressure here in the bilateral agreement than under GATS.

Whereas the US agreement is what is called a negative list agreement, GATS is a positive list. What this means is that under the US agreement, all aspects of trade between the two countries become "free" except those things which are specifically excluded. This is quite dangerous from a cultural point of view, because of the possibility of overlooking something important and so not having it excluded -- as happened with a negative list agreement with New Zealand. GATS is much safer. No cultural activities are included except those specifically added by our government -- although there still are risks that more general aspects of the agreement could "leak" into the cultural area.

As with the US FTA, two submissions can be found here: the submission from the Australian Coalition for Cultural Diversity dealing with the broad cultural issues:

Read the ACCD response, and The Music Council of Australia submission dealing with musical issues.

Both are modifications of the submissions concerning the Australia/US FTA, adopting the same approach but adding some issues that could arise under the different circumstances of GATS.