Fact Checking the TPP
From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment agreement was formally signed by 12 ministers in Auckland on February 4.
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon spoke in the Senate about the agreement.
"It has been put to me that, if a government introduced poker machine legislation to protect consumers, an overseas poker machine manufacturer could end up suing that government for doing what was clearly in the public interest," he said on November 10, 2015.
ABC Fact Check asked the Senator whether this statement reflected his own views.
"The risk I have identified in the statement is, I believe, well founded, given my understanding of the TPP and the initial analyses of the text," he told Fact Check.
Fact Check takes Senator Xenophon's statement to mean a successful legal claim against the Government, given a manufacturer can already launch an unsuccessful claim against the Government in an Australian court or elsewhere.
The scenario painted by Senator Xenophon is unlikely.
Technically, under the TPP it will be possible for an overseas poker machine manufacturer to bring a claim for damages against the Government.
However, for this to succeed and not be quickly dismissed, the company needs to have real operations in Australia and the Australian government must have changed gambling laws in such an egregious or discriminatory way that it breaches the investment protections in the TPP.
Ultimately, a TPP dispute will be decided on the specific facts of the case, and a tribunal's interpretation of the agreement remains uncertain.
But the introduction of reasonable gambling legislation that is "clearly in the public interest" is unlikely to lead to a successful claim by an overseas poker machine manufacturer.
That sounds right to me. But the more interesting question, and the one more likely to arise, is what happens to unreasonable legislation with a tenuous connection to the public interest.
There is more to the piece, with quotes from lots of experts.