The email below was sent to Scott Balson after he unsuccessfully took The Courier Mail to the Australian Press Council over two articles written by "National Affairs editor" Peter Charlton.
Mr Balson,
I notice that your home page is carrying my report in The Courier-Mail about the MAI. I own the copyright on that report. I receive a payment for the Copyright Council twice a year for articles of mine which have been copied and used.
I have not given you permission to use my report, or any other material which is my intellectual property.
Unless it is removed instantly, I shall sue.
Yours sincerely (and determinedly)
Peter Charlton
The Courier Mail - Saturday 21st March 1998
NOTE: The majority of the information selectively reported on here by Peter Charlton came from this web site.
In a clear breach of journalistic ethics Charlton refused to balance this report - aiming to present the MAI as "good for Australia".
Links in the article take you to our web pages from which his material was compiled.
In particular read the right of reply that was never published by the Courier Mail. See also my comments on 4QR.
"Earlier this month former High Court chief justice Sir Anthony Mason warned that a “veil of secrecy” covered negotiations on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment."
National affairs editor Peter Charlton reports.
Veil of secrecy or normal bureaucratic practice? That’s just one example of the choices of interpretations available on the current negotiations leading to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
The MAI, as the questions and answers on this page illustrate, is an eminently sensible objective for developed nations seeking to level the investment playing field. Yet negotiations over the past 30 months have produced some vehement opposition overseas and an odd alliance in Australia of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Democrats.
And it has been an alliance nurtured and developed thanks to that tool of the late 20th century, the Internet.
As any user knows, the Internet is a wonderful research tool. A local phone call, a few clicks of the mouse and the Net user is in the resources of, say, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development with its vast array of reports, statistics and other useful data. A few more clicks of the mouse and the Net user is deep inside a world of conspiracy theories and of global take-overs. Fruit loop territory.
And so it is with the information on the MAI. Take, for example, The MAI, a web page prepared by Global Web Builders on behalf of Pauline Hanson MP which makes the following claim, “The MAI is the international linchpin of what is, in the end, a totalitarian project for world rule”. Hanson’s page builders quote, with obvious approval, Malaysia Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad: “The traders apparently make billions with each transaction. But when the funds at their disposal are huge and they are in a position to influence the values of the currencies with their investments and divestments, then the currency markets become cash cows to them.’
Other links shown include ‘The enemy - MAI negotiators’, including the OECD home page. Frequently the critics of the MAI claim the negotiations are being carried out in secret, yet their own web pages show how the reports can be obtained and downloaded from the Internet. Hanson told Parliament on March 9: “I must state that that as it is not possible to download the text of the agreement of the Treasury internet site on a computer disc, it is very difficult and expensive to distribute the text of the treaty.”
Yet, researching this report, I downloaded the report using a laptop portable computer, with considerably less “grunt” and capacity than Hanson’s taxpayer provided computer.
Her objections - ill-informed, illogical, not based on fact and hysterically outlandish - are typical of other MAI critics, most notably in Canada, which has long had an ambivalent attitude towards foreign direct investment, particularly from big-brother United States. Groups in Canada opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA; MAI’s critics claim it is ‘NAFTA on steroids’.
Sharif Seid, a researcher of the Australian National University research school of social studies recently told ABC radio, “It’s a fetter on the future sovereignty of nations.”
“And worse than that, its being developed by six or seven men in the backroom in silence, and supposedly in the best interests of all of us. Without any consultation, without any open and transparent process of critique and analysis.’
Hanson’s criticisms can be dismissed as those of an ignorant, illeducated person with a political barrow to push; Seid’s opinions, as an academic working in the field might be better regarded - until they are subjected to elementary critical analysis.
“A fetter on the future sovereignty of nations?” Perhaps, but unlikely.
“Developed by six or seven men in the backroom in silence.” Not so, as the OECD can demonstrate clearly. But explanation does not always satisfy.
The OECD negotiators, both in the organisation itself and in member countries, made the mistake of ignoring these critics in Canada. They are now developing their own head of steam.
Secretary General of the OECD Don Johnson, a lawyer and former Canadian government minister, has done his best to counter criticism. He told ABC television earlier this month that there had been the usual press conferences and briefings.
“The reality is that the media have paid very little attention until recently,” he said. “There has never been any secrecy over the agreement... And there is no reason. There has never been any need for secrecy.
“It is a very significant agreement but a very modest step in what I hope will become a global investment agreement.”
Ironically, one of the reasons for the recent media attention has been the claims of the critics, what Johnson calls the misinformation campaign.
Misinformation indeed. One Canadian critic, Maud Barlow, whose record of service goes back to being a women’s adviser to the Trudeau government of the late 1960s, told the ABC she had to get hold of a copy of the draft agreement in a “paper bag”. “We have to protect our source,” she added mysteriously. Yet the various versions of the agreement published last year have been easily obtained on the OECD’s home page on the Web.
The same Internet has, however, provided a convenient means for the easy exchange of Barlow’s misinformation.
According to Alan Asher, deputy chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the MAI draft, as it stands is, a “sound document”. Asher would like to see more of what he calls “balancing obligations”, on such issues as the environment, privacy, competition policy and labour markets. He points out that many of these are already covered in existing United Nations agreements.
“... if they could be collected, the heat would pretty quickly disappear from the debate,” he said.
The Government has already referred the agreement to the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties. Hanson complains that the committee is dominated by members of the Government and the Opposition, without saying who should be on it. And Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer has promised “...nothing will be signed, nothing will be bound in any way, shape or form until it is tabled on the floor of the Australian Parliament, made public and then maybe, after that...”
An American commentator, Geoffrey Colvin, writing in the business magazine Fortune earlier this year, made this point - the argument over the MAI could have been worse.
“Before US negotiators, familiar with the term ‘missing in action’ weighed in, the treaty was to be called the Multilateral Investment Agreement, or the MIA.”
Even so, the MAI might yet go MIA. The US Congress is getting ready to take the cleaver to national self-interest to it while the Australian Government will not want yet another distraction in what’s going to be a tough election year.
A pity, that. Any agreement that encourages foreign direct investment into Australia - inwards investment as the Irish put it - could only be good. Ireland, once the basket case of Europe, is now a booming economy, thanks to “inwards investment”.