Chapters relating to regulatory coherence or cooperation are becoming significant features in new preferential trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While the existing literature has considered in detail the potential for harmonisation of standards or institutional...

This chapter examines the prominent role that Australia has played in the multilateral trading system, with a specific focus on the WTO and Australia's preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Australia has been actively involved in the WTO, through GATT and WTO negotiations, WTO committee work,...

The relationship between the bilateral investment treaty (‘BIT') between Australia and China (1988) and the preferential trade agreement between those countries (‘ChAFTA') (2015) provides an interesting case study of the co-existence of successive treaties under public international law....

Our submission is focussed on how Australia’s BITs can be modernised to ensure that the promotion and protection of investments is balanced against the need to safeguard policy space for legitimate public-welfare measures or ‘regulatory autonomy’. This discussion responds primarily to...

In this paper, we first identify in Part II the benefits of a common telecommunications market in Australia and New Zealand, before explaining in Part III the extent to which these two countries are already subject to obligations to liberalise telecommunications and harmonise associated...

The Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) provides an illustration of the outcomes that countries with relatively little bargaining and economic power can expect from an FTA with the US. It also serves as a warning of how even an economically successful developed country may end up...

The good health of its population is fundamental to a country's national interest. Regulation of these risk factors, however, presents particular challenges in the light of international trade law and international investment law, as policy interventions often seek behavioural change including...