No changes will be made to TPPA final text - Mustapa

No changes will be made to the final text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and Malaysia's participation will be solely decided by Parliament.

Minister of International Trade and Industry (MITI), Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed, said if Malaysia wanted to make changes to the final text, it would take a longer time to determine the country's decision on TPPA.

"For changes to be made to the final text, it will need new discussions with all related countries.

"Right now, our focus is to make sure our engagement and outreach programmes on TPP go out to as many Malaysians as possible before I present it to Parliament at the end of January 2016," he told reporters at 'TPP Programme with Student Representative Council' involving 300 students from public and private universities here today.

Mustapa said TPPA would be presented and debated according to the usual parliamentary meeting order -- Parliament and Senate.

On the voting process for TPPA in Parliament, Mustapa said, further discussions with the Speaker were needed to finalise the detail.

To-date, he said, hundreds of awareness programmes had been conducted involving officers from MITI and its agencies, Human Resource and Health Ministry.

"We also plan to conduct a briefing and a one-day workshop for all members of Parliament and various government deparments, including the Attorney-General Department officers," said Mustapa.

At the same, he said, MITI would also be organising its awareness programmes in Pahang, Sarawak and Johor next month, meeting state leaders and the public.

The TPPA negotiations, which were first launched in 2005, involved 12 countries -- Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, US and Vietnam.

The final TPPA document, together with two other cost-and-benefit analyses, were prepared by the Malaysian Institute of Strategic and International Studies and PricewaterhouseCoopers Malaysia and had been made public, early December.