And you thought the TPP was secret. The RCEP is even worse

So you would think we would be safe. Except that, in what The Wall Street Journal calls a long-shot, Barack Obama is going to attempt to push it through in the so-called lame duck weeks between Wednesday and the inauguration of his successor in January. Hundreds of economists and law professors have urged him not to, saying the provisions of the TPP would allow foreign investors – and foreign investors alone – to bypass "the basic procedures of the US justice system".

US corporations can't do it to us at the moment because the Howard government refused to include those provisions in the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement.

Right now, if US corporations want to sue us and don't find our court system to their liking, they have to pretend to be headquartered somewhere else, as the Philip Morris tobacco company did when it purported to move ownership of its Australian operations to Hong Kong in order to take advantage of the provisions of an obscure Australia-Hong Kong treaty after losing its case against our plain packaging laws in the High Court.

So far that case cost us more than $50 million to defend, and although we successfully fended off Philip Morris, we are yet to be awarded costs. It's a prospect that would terrify a smaller country.

Now there's a fresh move to have us face it time and time again, even if Obama fails to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP would have had 12 members. The lesser known RCEP – the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – would have 16 members including China, accounting for half of the world's population.

Leaked chapters of the draft agreement contain the same sort of investor-state dispute settlement procedures as the TPP. Although the Foreign Affairs website doesn't say so, our assistant trade minister Keith Pitt slipped into the Philippines on Friday to advance the negotiations.

Whereas in the TPP, Australia's delegations took community as well as business groups into its confidence, so far with the RCEP it's only been business groups. Patricia Ranald of the Fair Trade and Investment Network says that might be because, at least to start with, the US is excluded. It's a relatively open democracy. China, Indonesia, Malaysia and other RCEP members are not.

Just as with the TPP, our negotiators are releasing no texts and submitting none of what's proposed to cost-benefit analysis. There's every chance it will cut across rather than intermesh with the TPP and our other trade agreements. There's every chance we won't be told until it's too late.

Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age