In public the Australian government is on the side of consumers. Yet behind closed doors it is siding with the US government to block them turn after turn.

The extraordinarily detailed information on negotiating positions released overnight by WikiLeaks shows Australia repeatedly backing the interests of the US against the objections of countries including Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam on questions involving intellectual property. Australia is often the only one of the 12 parties to the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations to do so.

In 2005 Australia's High Court ruled it was legal for Australians to use so-called "mod chips" to bypass the copy-protection measures in Sony PlayStations. In June this year a committee comprising both sides of Parliament unanimously recommended Australia amend its copyright law to put beyond doubt "consumers' rights to circumvent technological protection measures that control geographic market segmentation". In other words, Australians would be free to modify DVD machines to play discs made for anywhere in the world and defeat the technologies that allow US giants such as Amazon and Apple to geographically segment markets to charge Australians more than almost anyone else.

The committee headed its report "At what cost? Information technology pricing and the Australian tax". It found Adobe software was 42 per cent more expensive than in the US, Microsoft products 66 per cent more expensive and hardware 46 per cent more expensive.

Yet in closed-door negotiations so secret the Australian media have been excluded from Australian briefings on their progress, Australia has backed the US in trying to criminalise such measures. An amendment proposed by Canada and Singapore that would make clear that it is legal to sell and import devices whose sole purpose is to defeat region coding does not list Australia as among its backers.