The TPP promotes discriminatory inefficient regional supply chains by encouraging firms to import inputs from and export to preferential markets. Yet establishing efficient global value chains requires cutting across all regions.

The US, a hegemon, wants to impose its trade rules on others through the TPP. President Obama has admitted the TPP exists to enable the US rather than China to set the trade rules in the Asia Pacific. Australia has no interest in any hegemon setting the rules, which risk being biased in its favour. Global trade rules are best set multilaterally and enforced in the WTO to safeguard the trading interests of other nations.

We want no repeat of Australia's bilateral with the US (the AUSFTA) where we agreed to US demands not just to offer preferential tariff and investment access to our market, but to strengthen IP protection, seemingly contrary to Australia's own economic interests. These IP provisions, favouring US firms, have now essentially been extended to all other TPP members. After rejecting US demands to adopt ISDS provisions in the AUSFTA, we accepted them in the TPP (except with New Zealand). Foreign (and not domestic) investors can now sue our government in an outside forum. Australia should avoid trading off negative domestic policy changes simply to clinch a trade deal.

It is inconceivable that discriminatory regionalism will somehow lead to globalisation and multilateralism. PTAs, as the TPP shows, are non-connectable. We are seeing the development of an international trading system that resembles an incomplete jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. Mega-regionals like the TPP entrench discrimination, including within, and add additional layers of convoluted discriminatory bilateral PTAs that do not help. The only solution lies in all governments multilateralising their "spaghetti bowl" of preferences to remove discrimination. However, this will not happen while ever governments choose discrimination over non-discrimination. Reviving the WTO to effectively defend globalism and non-discrimination would help, but instead governments persist in destroying it. Those advocating PTAs due to the failed Doha Round are only hastening the destruction of globalism and non-discrimination, with full disregard of the adverse impacts of discrimination on trade.

Contrary to official claims, the TPP has not really advanced trade liberalisation in Australia or elsewhere. All tariff reductions negotiated are spoiled by being discriminatory, and have the minimal relaxation of tariff quotas on food. Further, the TPP, like all PTAs, is more concerned in other areas with negotiating commitments on paper (e.g. services and government procurement), which often are less restrictive than existing measures and/or contain various loopholes and exclusions that ensure trade restrictions remain.