Avid economic fundamentalist Dr Andy Stoeckel, head of the Centre for International Economics (CIE), is at it again. He proclaims that every Australian family has been made $3,000 better off every year by our embracing "free trade".
The CIE has long been a voice of those arguing that farming and manufacturing should be cut free of industry "protection" and left helpless before the full-face of international competition.
It helped the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to convince gullible trade ministers - and former Prime Minister John Howard himself - that the various so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) constituted a legitimate part of the overall movement to liberalise trade.
Along the way its researches routinely concluded that specific bilateral FTAs greatly benefited the Australian economy and its consumers. Naturally, the CIE anticipated spectacular benefits to Australia from the bilateral Australia-United States FTA.
But now, thanks to a Commonwealth Parliamentary Library background briefing by Michael Priestley on FTAs (see reference below), the Australian public have access to figures with which they can assess what has really happened and balance it against what was predicted. Almost nothing has gone the way the CIE led us to believe it would.
So-called free trade agreements (FTAs) have proliferated in the past decade or so. In 1998 there were only six in the Asia-Pacific region. By the end of 2006, there were more than 60 FTAs, either completed or in various stages of negotiation. Read more.