Displaying items by tag: Andrew Robb

Australia loves to raise fears over anything to do with countries that it considers, well, below its exalted status, a status that exists only in the world of fiction.

The first Australian beneficiary of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement appears to have surfaced and unsurprisingly it is the Trade Minister himself.

COMMENT The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement had hardly been initialled early on Tuesday morning before the website of the Australian trade minister, Andrew Robb, published a list of what were termed the benefits of the deal.

COMMENT The current Australian government is prepared to bend over a little more than Labor was over the question of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, according to a leaked draft of this chapter of the proposed treaty.

Australian-listed mobile and online payments platform and logistics software provider SmartTrans has sealed an agreement with China's oldest and largest travel services provider, China International Travel Service (CITS) to build and distribute an App and integrated online platform that will enable Chinese and Australian consumers to book and pay for travel services between the two countries.

The Coalition today released its national ICT plan, ahead of the election it is widely expected to win on 7 September.

An apparent $5.6 billion funding shortfall in the Government's NBN budget has prompted calls by the Opposition for a full Treasury analysis of the costings. A spokesman for Shadow Minister for Finance and Debt Reduction Andrew Robb told iTWire that the Parliamentary Library, which yesterday revealed the Government's NBN budget anomaly, had done an admirable job.

The Coalition has written to the Australian Federal Police asking it to investigate the leaking of Treasury department analysis that found an $800 million dollar hole in savings the Opposition claimed could be made from axing the National Broadband Network.

The federal Opposition has restated its pledge to discontinue the "reckless" National Broadband Network roll-out if it wins government later this year, saying it would not proceed with the landmark cooperative agreement signed today between NBN Co and Telstra.

Coalition heavies Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb have mugged the Government's two flagship information technology projects as part of Opposition plans to cut $47 billion from federal spending if it is elected later this year.