Last weekend Australia had a big win when China agreed to review over the next five months its prohibitive tariffs on Australian wine, This weekend Trade Minister Don Farrell hopes to finally land a long-awaited free trade deal with the European Union, for which negotiations have been going on for years.
Farrell tells the Conversation’s podcast that if agreement can’t be reached, Australia will need to walk away because the Europeans will be entering election season.
At the end of the day, my job is to make a decision on the national interest. And if on balance, the things that are good about the European trade agreement outweigh the things that are bad – because there’s always bad things in agreements – then I feel I’ve got an obligation to the Australian people to say yes, we’ll sign this agreement.
If we haven’t got a deal, the Europeans move into their electoral cycle for elections next year. And I think we will have lost the opportunity for two, perhaps three years to come back and resolve this.
