Visiting Brussels on Thursday 8 September, Australian trade minister Steven Ciobo said Australia wanted to enter free trade talks with the EU in the first half of 2017, based on a scoping exercise due to be completed later this year.
At a press conference on Thursday, Ciobo said: "We need to find innovative ways to improve opportunities for growth. In that respect, Australia is a fierce advocate when it comes to the benefits of free trade and the deal that can be done between the EU and Australia. It is our firm belief that the nature of the trade relationship between the EU and Australia offers tremendous potential to drive high levels of economic growth with the ensuing benefits that flow from better opportunities for employment as a consequence".
"We’ve had a very successful scoping exercise which is near approaching its conclusion. It highlights the high level of ambition that exists on both sides. I hope the scoping will be concluded by the end of this year. It will then be leveraged into the formal commencement of the FTA negotiation next year", he said.
Ciobo said that negotiations for a future EU-Australia free-trade deal and a free-trade deal with post-Brexit UK were "two separate negotiations". "In fact, I wouldn’t even characterize the discussions with the UK as negotiations. With the UK, it remains a part of the EU and does for at least the next two and a half years, I expect. We have made it clear in London", he said.
Canberra and London "will look at forming a working group at an officials’ level to look at scoping discussions around a possible post-Brexit UK-Australia FTA, but this suggests that that process parallels with the much more mature process that we have undertaken with the EU", he said. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)