Portfolio — 1 June 2026

Trade and Tourism Minister Don Farrell is leading Australia's delegation to the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in Paris this week, with a program that places the Australia-EU Free Trade Agreement at the centre of his bilateral agenda. The headline bilateral engagement is a meeting with French Trade Minister Nicolas Forissier and other EU counterparts to press the case for the Australia-EU FTA, which the minister's office frames as opening a market of 450 million consumers — equivalent to sixteen times Australia's population [TA-260601-trade-dc3a63b8d010].

That scale framing is the sharpest piece of public messaging in the release, signalling that the government is now actively selling the FTA's market-access value to European counterparts rather than simply negotiating its terms. Alongside the bilateral program, Farrell will host a CEO roundtable with major French businesses to solicit investment into Australia's infrastructure, energy and resources sectors, a strand of activity that ties trade diplomacy directly to domestic economic priorities.

He will also convene the annual WTO Ministers' meeting on the OECD sidelines to advance the government's WTO reform agenda. The release positions all of this activity under an explicit government commitment to diversifying trading relationships and securing broader trade agreements for Australian businesses, producers, exporters and workers — language consistent with the Albanese Government's standing trade diversification message.

No prior context candidates were available for this window, so the Paris delegation stands as the primary current-period signal from this portfolio.