The global summit season ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. We've had the G20, APEC, and the Paris COP21.
Now, in Nairobi, trade ministers are meeting for the Tenth WTO Ministerial Conference. One recalls Keating's quip of being flogged with warm lettuce. That, in this case, may be an insult to lettuce.
Expectations of the conference could hardly be lower. Nearly 15 years of Doha round talks have delivered little, and prospects remain bleak. 
The talks hit a wall in   July of 2008. Various observers thought an agreement was close at that point, but talks broke down over disagreements about agriculture - chief protagonists included the US on one side and India on the other.
Since 2008, agreement on the Doha round has become even more difficult. The large emerging countries have grown more powerful, and the world of yesteryear, where an agreement rose or fell on the basis of a US-European deal, is gone. There are new kids on the block.
A minor triumph occurred at the Ninth Ministerial in Bali in 2013. The "Bali Package" was born. An important part of the package was the Trade Facilitation Agreement, which basically was an agreement to cut red tape.
That sounds uncontroversial enough, although even this benign pact suffered a near death experience. After Bali, India threatened to scupper the deal because it was unhappy about some other provisions of the Bali Package.
Remarkably, agriculture was an issue again. For agreements forged in the 21st century, it is striking that we always seem to get stuck on issues that belong in the 19th. In any case, a compromise was reached in 2014, and now the agreement is set to enter into force once enough WTO members have ratified it.
The whole episode highlights how difficult things are.
And so we find ourselves in Nairobi, with little progress in sight. A draft communique has been released before the meetings. It certainly is not signalling anything momentous.
There is no doubt the WTO has disappointed. Proponents of bilateral and regional deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, argue that this disappointment leads us naturally down the route they prefer. If a global deal is out of reach, so the argument goes, these deals are now the only game in town, and so we have to sign on.
That's wrong. They are not the only game in town. Unilateral liberalisation is still on the table.
Why on earth does Australia still have tariffs? We could eliminate them tomorrow if we wished. And we should.
However, advocates of these preferential agreements suggest the deals will pave the way for global reform in a way that unilateral liberalisation cannot. The hope is these agreements can be stitched together one day and facilitate a truly global deal.
If that's the case - and it's a big if - a lot of thought needs to be given to the design of these agreements. If they are stitched together, then their terms will, by default, form the basis of the hoped-for global, consolidated, settlement.
One area where it appears little such attention has been paid intellectual property.
Intellectual property protections seem to be motivated by a desire to increase innovation and economic growth. However, there is a considerable amount of economic literature suggesting existing intellectual property protections actually inhibit innovation.
One of my favourite books, Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David Levine, summarises this literature. They argue that more intellectual protection leads to less innovation, as companies divert attention away from creation toward legal manoeuvring intended to protect their intellectual turf.Yet many preferential agreements, including those that Australia has signed up to, enshrine in international treaty strong intellectual property protections. These protections go further than existing multilaterally agreed minimums.
Concern about this practice has led many reviews of Australian policy to suggest caution in adopting these intellectual property provisions. Examples include the Harper Review, the Pharmaceutical Patents Review, and the Productivity Commission's review into free trade agreements from 2010.
The Productivity Commission has been asked to conduct an inquiry into Australia's intellectual property arrangements that may look at this issue in detail once again. I certainly hope they do apply their intellectual firepower to this question ???again! However, I fear that just like its forebears, any recommendations in this area will be left to gather dust.
We have a new Prime Minister who emphasises innovation. There is potentially no more important part of our trade policy than how it relates to innovation. And we look to be getting it wrong. In Australia and globally.