Sebastian,

There seems to be some misunderanding about WTO, FTA and BTA. As far as us mugs can see, they are all tarred with the same brush, mostly controlled from Pax Americana, with full backing from that meanskinned EU, with subsidies and all. We can well ask what is causing our milk farmers in Western Australia to sell out while their properties are holding their value only because they are close to Perth, the middle-men or Big Biz reaping the cream as they did back in the 1920s. We also have our former little cooperative Wesfarmers among the rip-off merchants, both our local Labour government and Federal Conservative Government backing Wesfarmers to the full because economic rationalism - originally meant to mean to share and share alike - now represents excessive economic greed and extreme global capitalism with billions being made by the new top brass, but with the people of the backblocks not the miners, going broke.

Also we see our orchardists ripping out their citrus trees, opening up the paddocks once again to cattle or fat lambs, certainly not to dairy farming. Also we have our WA wheat cockies regarded as growing the best wheat with good yields on the most unfertile farming land in the world. But we are being sold out and undercut by our dear friends the Americans, now also helped by Canada, in grabbing our Middle East markets.

Nearly forgot again what bilaterism nearly did to our Bio-Protection laws, when a shipment of foot and mouth suspected carcase meat was landed in NSW and hastily buried on a dump, but not a word about it from our media. Just wondering who controls who in our ersatz democracy right now?

One thing I think we are all forgetting is the part where foreign investment is not subject to review by the foreign investment review board up to $800m, up from $50m. This explains why the Americans are so eager to get a free trade agreement up. Why would they want to pay import duty on raw materials and products made by their own companies just because the factory, farm or mine that produced them was in Australia?

Perhaps the worst, mostly unforseen, affect will be on Australian monetary policy. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy ) Currently the federal government through the reserve bank can regulate the supply of new money into the economy, as well as the cost (interest rate) of that money. With large amounts of foreign investment flowing in this regulation may become meaningless and the economy will be awash with inflation producing cash at the same time as the US based multinationals are slashing jobs in their new aquisitions, causing the same sort of stagflation we saw under Ronny Raygun in the early 1980s