Subject: Stop MAI Media Release 7/9/98 (fwd)

From: Victor Guest <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 1998 10:36:42 WST

From: "Brian Jenkins" <[email-masked]>
To: "Multiple WA contacts Stop MAI" <[email-masked]>

The following media release was issued today.

Tomorrow's Rockingham meeting is last chancefor local public participation 
in MAI debate

A final public meeting on the controversial Multilateral Agreement on
Investment will be held on Tuesday, 8 September, 7.30 pm., at the Ocean
Clipper Inn, Patterson Road, Rockingham. The meeting will be addressed by
TLC president Keith Peckham, Phil Sparrow of Community Aid Abroad and
Stephen Robson of Murdoch University.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) will hold
high-level talks in Paris on Oct. 20-21 to determine the future of the
treaty.

Negotiators are expected to set a formal deadline for signing the treaty
(whose text is believed to be 90 per cent complete) or to shift talks to 
the World Trade Organization as a result of overwhelming public concern 
about the MAI in many developed nations.

The MAI would establish far-reaching new rights for foreign investors and
allow corporations and investors to sue signatory governments directly for
cash damages. It would lock all Australian governments into the deal for a
minimum of 20 years.

Under the same provision in the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), Canada was recently forced to revoke a public health law banning a toxic
petrol additive and to pay U.S.-based Ethyl Corp. $A20 million in damages
for profits lost while the law was in effect.

The deputy premier in the former Trudeau Government, Paul Hellyer, has
commented: "Globalization is not about trade. It is about power and control.
It is the reshaping of the world into one without borders ruled by a
dictatorship of the world's most powerful central banks, commercial banks
and multinational companies. It is an attempt to undo a century of social
progress and to alter the distribution of income from inequitable to
inhuman.".

[ends]