The fourth round of Free Trade Agreement (FTA)
negotiations with Australia took place between Monday 22 February
and Friday 5 March.
During the two weeks, negotiators held 51 negotiation sessions,
covering 27 different chapter areas. In total, we have had 170
sessions since launching negotiations in July 2020.
Both the negotiation teams shared text and additional proposals
before the round, including on Digital, Labour and Technical
Barriers to Trade, allowing negotiators to enhance their
substantive conversations. From this, negotiators were able to
build mutual understanding, and make further progress
consolidating texts in most chapter areas. Focused engagement has
enabled negotiators to provisionally identify shared ambition and
remaining points of divergence to work through ahead of the next
round.
Good progress has been made in areas including Customs, Rules of
Origin, and Professional Services. The majority of text has been
agreed in chapters on Good Regulatory Practice, as well as Small
to Medium-Sized Enterprises. Development in the latter reflects
the commitment of both Australia and the UK to ensuring
businesses of all sizes can benefit from the FTA.
Some text was agreed in cross-border trade in services.
Negotiators were also able to hold technical discussions on
mobility, international maritime transport services, express
delivery services and domestic regulation. Meanwhile, progress
was also made on Procurement and Digital, with parts of the text
agreed. In addition, there were productive discussions on the
Innovation chapter.
Discussions were taken forward on Investment, where we hope to
include provisions which further enhance our strong bilateral
relationship, building on the UK’s position as second largest
direct investor in Australia and the second largest recipient of
Australian Foreign Direct Investment in 2019.
The Australia and UK negotiation teams have also planned an
intensive period of intersessional discussions in the coming
weeks to continue this momentum ahead of a fifth round of talks.
Below is a summary list of the areas discussed in the round,
which continued to take place by video conference:
- Anti-Corruption
- Competition
- Customs and Trade Facilitation
- Development
- Digital/ e-commerce
- Environment & Clean Growth
- Financial Services
- Good Regulatory Practice
- Innovation
- Intellectual Property
- Investment
- Labour
- Legal and Institutional provisions
- Government Procurement
- Rules of Origin
- Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures
- Services, including movement of natural persons, professional
services, international maritime transport services and delivery
services.
- Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
- State-to-State Dispute Settlement
- Technical Barriers to Trade
- Telecommunications
- Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment
- Trade in Goods
- Transparency
Any deal the UK Government agrees will be fair and balanced and
in the best interests of the whole of the UK. As we will in all
negotiations, we remain committed to upholding our high
environmental, labour, product and food safety, and animal
welfare standards in our trade agreement with Australia, as well
as protecting the National Health Service (NHS).
