The former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott says the government should not allow a fear of inflaming tensions with China get in the way of accepting Taiwan’s bid to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact.
Abbott also called on the Australian government to urge the US to “reconsider their aloofness from the TPP, which was originally their own idea”.
China and Taiwan have submitted duelling bids to enter the regional trade pact, which currently has 11 members including Australia, Japan and New Zealand – but not the US, which walked away from the deal under Donald Trump.
Abbott said on Thursday his disposition was “strongly in favour of Taiwan entering the TPP”, adding he couldn’t think of many reasons to block its admission.
“The only argument that occurs to me is that it might upset China,” Abbott told an Australian parliamentary inquiry into expanding membership of the trade pact.
“But given that China is not a member of the TPP, is unlikely to become a member of the TPP, and is already in a state of high dudgeon against Australia and many other countries, I don’t see that China is going to be any more upset than it already is.”
The comments come after the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, said it would have to overcome “some political problems” to be successful in its bid to join the trade grouping, which is now officially known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TPP.
Tsai said on Wednesday the move was important to Taiwan’s economy and trade. It was also seen as a first step towards free trade agreements with the US and Europe.
Taiwan’s bid, submitted six days after China’s, was lodged under the same name it uses as a member of the World Trade Organization, “the separate customs territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu”.
But the Chinese government has warned against Taiwan’s accession to the trade grouping, maintaining its position that the democratic self-ruled island is “an inalienable part of China’s territory”.
“China … firmly rejects Taiwan’s accession to any agreement or organisation of official nature,” a foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, told reporters in Beijing last week.
Abbott recently expressed a degree of regret about the free trade agreement his government signed with Beijing in 2015, telling a thinktank that China’s behaviour under Xi Jinping was a “hell of a wake-up call” for Australia.
On Thursday Abbott said Australia should try to persuade the Biden administration that it was in the interests of the US and the region for Washington to consider joining the deal.
“I suppose we just need to be talking to them and pointing out what I think is pretty obvious: that the TPP is a group of nations which believe in trade which is freer and fairer and which are absolutely resolved to deal fairly and squarely with each other to operate in a rules-based order,” he said.
“I suspect this might be one of the few things that these days there is bipartisanship on in Washington.”
Abbott noted that the TPP was originally conceived “as the economic arm” of Barack Obama’s “tilt” to the Asia-Pacific.
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He said trade “became a bit of a hot potato in the United States in 2016” due to a “very widespread view that China had unfairly taken advantage” of global trade rules. He said it was “unfortunate that the TPP got caught up in all of that”.
In 2015, when Abbott was prime minister, he rounded on critics of the TPP and the China-Australia free trade agreement, accusing them of “xenophobic politics”.
Critics of free trade agreements had “forgotten their history”, Abbott said at the time, adding that such deals were “too important for our businesses and too important for our children to be sacrificed at the altar of short-term, xenophobic politics”.
Since last year, Abbott has been listed on the Australian government’s foreign influence register as an adviser to the UK Board of Trade, where his unpaid role “is to advocate for free and fair trade especially trade with the UK and its allies”.
Abbott used the parliamentary hearing to advocate for the UK’s accession to the regional trade pact. He said there was no reason for this trade grouping to be “geographically exclusive”.
He said it would be “a wonderful thing to expand it by including the United Kingdom as swiftly as possible”.
The Australian trade minister, Dan Tehan, has said the UK is “first in line to accede” to the trade pact. He has signalled Canberra would not consider China’s bid unless Beijing ended the freeze on ministerial talks and ceased trade actions against Australia.
Additional reporting by Helen Davidson
