Australia notes that the provisions of Articles 5 and 10(11) do not diminish its rights and obligations under the GATT, including as elaborated in the Uruguay Round Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures, particularly with respect to the list of exceptions in Article 5(3), which it considers incomplete.
Australia further notes that it would not be appropriate for dispute settlement bodies established under the Treaty to give interpretations of GATT articles III and XI in the context of disputes between parties to the GATT or between an Investor of a party to the GATT and another party to the GATT. It considers that with respect to the application of Article 10(11) between an Investor and a party to the GATT, the only issue that can be considered under Article 26 is the issue of the awards of arbitration in the event that a GATT panel or the WTO dispute settlement body first establishes that a trade-related investment measure maintained by the Contracting Party is inconsistent with its obligations under the GATT or the Agreement on TradeRelated Investment Measures.
(1) A Contracting Party shall not apply any trade-related investment measure that is inconsistent with the provisions of article III or XI of the GATT 1994; this shall be without prejudice to the Contracting Party’s rights and obligations under the WTO Agreement and Article 29.
The representatives’ agreement to Article 5 is not meant to imply any position on whether or to what extent the provisions of the “Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures” annexed to the Final Act of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations are implicit in articles III and XI of the GATT.
(2) Such measures include any investment measure which is mandatory or enforceable under domestic law or under any administrative ruling, or compliance with which is necessary to obtain an advantage, and which requires:
(a) the purchase or use by an enterprise of products of domestic origin or from any domestic source, whether specified in terms of particular products, in terms of volume or value of products, or in terms of a proportion of volume or value of its local production; or
(b) that an enterprise’s purchase or use of imported products be limited to an amount related to the volume or value of local products that it exports;
or which restricts:
(c) the importation by an enterprise of products used in or related to its local production, generally or to an amount related to the volume or value of local production that it exports;
(d) the importation by an enterprise of products used in or related to its local production by restricting its access to foreign exchange to an amount related to the foreign exchange inflows attributable to the enterprise; or
(e) the exportation or sale for export by an enterprise of products, whether specified in terms of particular products, in terms of volume or value of products, or in terms of a proportion of volume or value of its local production.
(3) Nothing in paragraph (1) shall be construed to prevent a Contracting Party from applying the trade-related investment measures described in subparagraphs (2)(a) and (c) as a condition of eligibility for export promotion, foreign aid, government procurement or preferential tariff or quota programmes.
(4) Notwithstanding paragraph (1), a Contracting Party may temporarily continue to maintain trade-related investment measures which were in effect more than 180 days before its signature of this Treaty, subject to the notification and phase-out provisions set out in Annex TRM.