MULTINATIONAL'S HAND AUSTRALIA'S HAND
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal amounts to a sell off to multinationals.
Médecins Sans Frontières says a soon-to-be-sealed trade deal will push up local medicine costs and place life-saving ones out of reach for millions of patients in developing countries.
Leaked chapters showed it granted pharmaceutical companies extended patents, allowing them to charge higher prices.
The trade pact, which involves 12 countries covering 40 per cent of the world's economy. It has also come under fire for containing a clause that allows multinationals to sue governments if new laws harm their profits.
The Investment chapter, leaked in March showed some public health carve-outs, specifically the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Medicare Benefits Scheme, Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator. These exemptions are "seriously flawed".
They will not protect countries like Australia, let alone Vietnam, Malaysia or Peru, from the threat of pharmaceutical companies exercising legal threats or action to enforce monopolies they are afforded in the TPP.
The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET) said the carve-outs showed the government's assurances about general safeguards embedded in the TPP are rubbish.
The fact they've named those specific institutions means that the general safeguards are not effective. If they have to name those institutions, how about the other ones such as in food regulation, environmental protections?
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