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Australia boards the slow boat to Brexit

Trade negotiations will take years, says minister

Australia reckons it can be the first to secure a free trade deal with what's left of the UK post-Brexit, with the two countries to create a trade working group next year.

The process is certain to be comically slow: as readers of The Register has already reported, merely negotiating Brexit is going to be a long, slow process. No matter what happens in the Bilateral Trade Working Group meetings reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, they won't result in a treaty until Brexit is completed.

The joint statement between the two trade ministers, Steve Ciobo and Liam Fox, explains that the two ministries will be working on “the expeditious transition to Free Trade Agreement negotiations when the UK has formally completed its negotiations to exit the EU.”

Amusingly, the ministerial release also says Australia and the UK want to “maintain momentum” in negotiations that haven't yet commenced.

The negotiators will be waiting not only for Westminster to cut the legislative cords that define Britain's membership of the EU: its first priority will be cutting trade deals one-by-one with the remaining EU member countries, even though some argue individual trade deals won't be able to replace the economic benefits of EU membership.

With or without economic benefits, Australia's strong ties to the UK will mean that, if nothing else, it will be important to ensure post-Brexit data exchange and privacy arrangements are satisfactory to both countries.

Such matters may be a way down the list: the ABC points out that British farmers want to retain the generous subsidies they currently enjoy and that's going to be resented by Australia's agricultural sector in any free trade agreement negotiation.

In the meantime, Australia wants a bunch of other bilateral trade negotiations to proceed, with Ciobo nominating Indonesia as the government's most immediate priority. ®

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