46. The representative of Australia said that participation was a fundamental issue, in particular for those Members that were not wines and spirits producers, and that the joint proposal left the choice of whether or not to participate to individual Members. His delegation disagreed with the point made by the European Communities that the joint proposal would amount to a plurilateral agreement. Under the joint proposal approach, all Members would participate in the negotiations to establish a system, have access to the system once it was established and, if they so wished, have the opportunity to participate in the system by notifying domestic geographical indications. As had been pointed out by his delegation in previous meetings, the system proposed in the joint proposal would be multilateral in the same way as the multilateral Code of Good Practice in Annex 3 of the TBT Agreement, which was open to acceptance by the standardizing bodies of any Member but was not compulsory for all Members. That was precisely what Article 23.4 meant.
