Trudy McIntosh, Host: Joining me live now is the Assistant Foreign Minister and Trade Minister, Matt Thistlethwaite. Matt, you're there in Melbourne for these trade talks we're seeing at the moment. I want to get to that in a second, but your right of reply on this part time Minister tag that the Opposition's keen to use for Chris Bowen for the next 12 months or so. Mount the case here. Why is it the best use of his time to be looking after COP on one hand, when we need him to lock in the renewables rollout, make sure that's happening properly and get down power prices at home?
Matt Thistlethwaite, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade: G'day, Trudy. Chris Bowen, being the President of Negotiations for COP over the next 12 months will be good for Australia. It will mean that we will be able to deepen our engagement on renewable energy and climate change action, particularly with our neighbours in the Pacific who are facing an existential threat from climate change. But it will also mean we'll have broader negotiations with particularly our region, the Asia Pacific and beyond. And that will mean that there will be opportunities for investment in renewable energy projects in Australia and for Australian companies abroad. So, it's a good thing that Chris is taking on this role and it'll be good for Australian businesses.
McIntosh: I want to get your assessment on how the Pacific neighbours view this decision. I know they wanted Australia and their own countries to be able to jointly host it. How will you explain to them the decision to walk away? On the one hand, you've also got Labor sources briefing the media that there's essentially a bit of a sigh of relief internally that we're not going to have to host the summit. How do you explain that to the Pacific countries?
Assistant Minister: Well, we're disappointed and no doubt Pacific nations are disappointed as well. We hoped to be able to host COP in conjunction with our Pacific neighbours to demonstrate to the rest of the world the urgency of stronger action on climate change and boosting renewables for our region. And we wanted to do that in partnership with them. However, something is better than nothing and we've been able to negotiate something in Chris Bowen taking on this important role. He's talking about a pre-COP in the Pacific so we can bring some of those northern hemisphere leaders to our region to see the urgency of climate change getting some attention for the Green Climate Fund, for the Pacific Resilience Fund, which is all about investing in infrastructure upgrades in greater resilience and capability within our region, the Pacific, to bolster those communities and protect them from the effects of climate change into the future.
McIntosh: Matt, you're there at these talks alongside the Trade Minister, Don Farrell today. The CPTPP, it's a mouthful of an acronym. Aren't they always? What's the latest update there on whether this trade bloc, a big one, could be expanded?
Assistant Minister: Yeah, we've had a pretty good outcome to the meeting today, Trudy, where we've agreed to deepen and broaden the CPTPP. Deepen it in terms of looking at other areas where we can expand the agreement to cover things like e-commerce, financial transactions, custom duties and of course broadening it. It's a free trade agreement. It's countries that come together, 12 nations that are devoted to free and fair trade within our region. The pleasing thing is that there's other nations that want to join it. And today we've progressed Costa Rica becoming a member and we're looking hopefully to concluding that by the end of the year. But we've also identified some other candidate nations for next year to look at joining as well. Firstly, Uruguay and then moving on to looking to the Philippines and Indonesia, two important partners within our region and the United Arab Emirates as well. So, deepening the CPTPP and broadening its appeal will mean greater free trade throughout the world.
McIntosh: You look on it, you know these efforts to expand the free trade, I note the use of the word free trade when our biggest ally, the United States, anything but at the moment with this sort of erratic on again, off again tariffs from Donald Trump, how do we square that?
Assistant Minister: Well, that's why the CPTPP is so important. It's a group of likeminded nations that have come together to basically reject the approach that has been taken by the United States and say that in our view putting tariffs on products from Australia and other nations into the United States isn't the way to go. No one wins from tariffs, particularly American consumers. Unfortunately, they're going to face higher prices for a number of their products and they're starting to face that now. So, we believe that the best approach is to try and work together to reduce those barriers to trade. Now the United States has some legitimate concerns about the World Trade Organization and its inability through its rules to deal with some of the issues that have developed in the United States around competition in their industrial sector. They're legitimate concerns and Australia recognises those. But we don't believe that placing tariffs on imports is the way to go about it. We prefer to work through the WTO on rule changes to update those rules so that they can cater for and deal with those disputes, rather than imposing tariff barriers.
McIntosh: We're seeing the Prime Minister at the G20 over the next few days. He's got a meeting locked in with the EU President or EU Commission President, I believe. Are we on the verge of a breakthrough with this long stalled free trade agreement with the EU? Are you willing to put a timeline? Could we see it actually done and dusted next year?
Assistant Minister: Yeah, we're getting much closer, Trudy. And Maroš Šefčovič, the EU Trade Commissioner, was here yesterday. He had meetings with Don Farrell to further progress the agreement and hopefully get towards Australia. EU Free trade agreement. And the fact that he's been in the region twice over the last month, I think is a pretty good indicator that we're very close. And the Prime Minister will now follow that up at the G20 this weekend, meeting with Ursula von der Leyen. I'm not going to put a timeline on it, but we're certainly getting very, very close. And I think that the Prime Minister will make further progress and hopefully not too far off concluding that agreement.
McIntosh: It's been talked about for years. Let's see if it can finally be pulled off. Assistant Foreign Minister Matt Thistlethwaite, appreciate your time this afternoon. Thank you.
Assistant Minister: Thank you, Trudy.