An Australia-United States free trade agreement

The idea of a preferential Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States, the two countries alone or with others, has been examined closely and left on the shelf several times in the past two decades. It has been examined closely because Australia and the United States share many strategic and economic interests, and it is intuitively attractive to reflect these shared interests in special trading arrangements. It has been left on the shelf for several reasons, the most compelling of which is that it is hard politically for the United States to accept clean free trade with Australia except in the context of multilateral free trade. At the same time, it is hard politically and damaging economically for Australia to accept a dirty free trade arrangement that compromises such central agricultural interests as grain, meat and sugar. In addition, analysis has never revealed large enough net economic benefits to Australia, from any preferential trading arrangement that was judged to be feasible, to outweigh the cost of moving forward.