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Susan Hawthorne
Victoria University
'The Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement:
A Case Study in How Globalisation Negatively Affects the Poorest People in the Community'
On a feminist email list recently someone commented that the Australia-United
States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) was not really a feminist issue. This paper
presents the reasons why the AUSFTA is a feminist issue and how it will have a
negative effect on women, Indigenous people and the poor, and on the environment.
The AUSFTA brings forward many features of the World Trade Organisation's General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and it has also provided John Howard with
an excuse to follow George W. Bush into war games with Iraq. Among the issues
examined are: Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and US biochemical
company access to Australia's rich biodiversity; diminishing access to low-cost
health services and pharmaceutical benefits; an increase in the user-pays principle
in education and a decreasing pool of government funding for public education;
early US company access to the Australian market at the expense of the Australian
population; diminished sovereignty in relation to quarantine which protects Australia's
unique flora and fauna and instead provides access to US agribusiness alongside
newly introduced genetically modified plants.
Bio: Dr Susan Hawthorne is the author of a novel, The Falling Woman, a collection of poems, Bird and the co-editor of several anthologies of lesbian writing including Car Maintenance, Explosives and Love and other lesbian writings (with Cathie Dunsford and Susan Sayer). She is working on a series of hypertext poems on lesbian culture and a work of lesbian philosophy. Susan Hawthorne completed her PhD in Women's Studies through the Political Science Department at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity and co-editor of September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives (with Bronwyn Winter) and of CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity (with Renate Klein).
<hawthorne@netspace.net.au>