Equally concerning is that under the proposed deal, the government will effectively be signing away our sovereignty - our right to make decisions independent of outside influences - in two of the most important areas: quarantine laws and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Under the deal, the US has won the right for American representatives to sit on the Australian bodies that determine our quarantine laws
Similarly, the US has won the right to have American representatives sit on the Australian board that decide which medicines will be subsidized by Australian taxpayers' money.
It takes little to appreciate the army of savvy US legal experts that will be aggressively advocating Australia's subsidization of American pharmaceuticals.
And US Pharmaceutical companies already receive enormous assistance from their own government through a sophisticated range of publicly funded intellectual property supports.
This astounds me. I will not comment further until we finally get the text instead of DFAT's increasingly odd summaries. Why can't the government just post the text?
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