Reviewing the UK’s first post-Brexit trade deal: UK-Australia

Trade Bites

The UK signed a bilateral Free Trade Agreement with Australia in December 2021. This is the first ‘new’ Free Trade Agreement (FTA) the UK has negotiated with a trade partner. This ‘world-class’ agreement marks a ‘landmark moment in the historic and vital relationship between our two Commonwealth nations’, according to the international trade secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan. It’s certainly an ambitious Agreement, for one thing it will remove practically all tariff protection for imports of agricultural products – something which the EU would be very unlikely to have countenanced. But what does the agreement deliver in other areas, like services, government procurement, climate protection or digital trade? Furthermore, the Agreement is potentially an important benchmark for future trade negotiations, notably the ongoing application by the UK for accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), so how does it fair in terms of broader trade relations? To make their assessments of the new agreement, Chris Horseman is joined by Dr Emily Lydgate, Deputy Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory, Dr Minako Morita-Jaeger, Senior Research Fellow in International Trade at the University of Sussex, and Policy Research Fellow at the UK Trade Policy Observatory with special guest, Professor Peter Draper, Executive Director of the Institute for International Trade at the University of Adelaide.