And so it appears that agreement has now been reached on a TPP-like agreement, minus the United States. We haven’t yet seen the details (although this MFAT note is useful), but all the comments late last year suggested that the new agreement would stick as closely to the previously-agreed, but not ratified, TPP as possible (but presumably without the Joint Macroeconomic Declaration).
I wrote a few posts a couple of years ago, expressing doubts about the then-TPP agreement. I wrote – and write – from the pro-trade, pro-market side of the argument. Which, of course, is not the same as a “pro-business” perspective.
Sadly, TPP (and its replacement), like the welter of preferential trade agreements various governments have been signing over recent decades, isn’t necessarily a step towards free-trade at all. That is a point the Australian Productivity Commission has long been making about such trade agreements…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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