Over the last couple of months, there has been a quite astonishing level of antagonism towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. There has often been debate about whether we should sign a free trade deal – there was quite a bit at the time the Labour Government signed the free trade deal with China for example – but nothing like the debate which has raged over the TPPA.
It is impossible in one short article to do full justice to all the arguments of those who oppose the deal – and of course it may never come into force, given the level of opposition to the deal in the United States – but it seems to me that there are three main concerns of those who oppose the deal.
First, some critics are angry that the deal was negotiated “in secret”. Well yes, that’s true: I’m not aware of any international treaty which has ever been negotiated in public, with all our potential demands and all our potential concessions laid out for all to see. That would be rather like playing poker with all your cards face up on the table. The fact is that the TPPA had its origins at the end of the nineties, when trade ministers from New Zealand and Singapore met over lunch in Wellington (I was present at the lunch). Both countries saw potential benefits in designing a high quality agreement which other countries could then be invited to join.
Initially, the agreement attracted only two other small countries, Chile and Brunei. It was to the credit of the Clark Labour Government that in the middle part of the last decade the United States was invited to join the deal, and as soon as the US became involved a number of other countries quickly saw the benefit of joining too.
While none of the countries disclosed what their negotiating “bottom lines” were, the whole world knew that the negotiations were taking place, and what they aimed to achieve.
Second, some critics fear that, in ratifying the deal, we would be “giving up our sovereignty”. To this, the answer must be “yes and no”. Yes, signing any international agreement involves binding ourselves to do certain things and not to do certain other things. Belonging to the United Nations, or the International Labour Organisation, or the World Trade Organisation, involves some loss of sovereignty, but in all cases democratically elected New Zealand governments have judged that the benefits substantially outweigh the costs. The same is true when we do a free trade deal with China or South Korea or Australia.
But what about the dreaded Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) rules? Doesn’t that give nasty American corporate giants the right to sue the New Zealand government? New Zealand already has ISDS rules in place in other free trade agreements, and to date New Zealand has never been challenged under these rules, and won’t be as long as we deal fairly with foreign investors. Moreover, nothing in the TPPA prevents the government from regulating on a range of matters, including the environment, public health and the purchase of agricultural land.
And of course, at the end of the day we retain the sovereign right to withdraw from the TPPA if we don’t like the effect it is having on us.
Third, some critics are Maori radicals who object to the fact that the government negotiated this deal without involving Maori specifically in the negotiations. But then the government was elected to govern in the interests of all New Zealanders, not in the interests of any particular ethnic group. Most New Zealanders would be outraged at the suggestion that the Government had to involve iwi in the negotiations.
Some of the concerns of Maori radicals about the TPPA are just factually wrong. For example, Hone Harawira contended on RNZ’s Morning Report programme in January that there was “no mention” of Maori in the TPPA, “no mention” of the Treaty of Waitangi in the TPPA, and “no mention” of the protections for Maori through the Waitangi Tribunal in the TPPA.[1] In fact, he was simply wrong on all counts. There are indigenous people in many of the 12 countries which signed the TPPA, but Maori are the only group who are specifically mentioned in the TPPA in the context of allowing the New Zealand Government to discriminate in their favour if required to do so by the Treaty of Waitangi.
The TPPA is not perfect, and yes, it would have been better if we had been able to negotiate much better access to some major markets for our dairy exports. But the New Zealand Government estimates that we will be better off to the tune of at least $2.7 billion annually by 2030 if the deal goes ahead, while a calculation made by the US-based Peterson Institute for International Economics is even more optimistic, believing it will add US$6 billion to our real incomes annually, and US$9 billion to our annual exports, as compared with a world without the TPPA. To take just one specific example, Japanese tariffs on our meat exports to that country will fall from 40% to just 9% if the deal goes ahead – and that has to substantially benefit the farming community.
If the TPPA is ratified by 11 of the 12 countries which have signed the deal – but not by New Zealand – we would be on the outside of the world’s largest single trading bloc. At that point, I have not the slightest doubt that most of us would be wishing we were on the inside. Those who don’t like John Key for supporting the TPPA should remember that Helen Clark strongly supports our participation in it – as do three other former Labour Party leaders, Mike Moore, Phil Goff and David Shearer. Debate over the TPPA is not a dispute between the National Party and the rest of the country but between those who understand that a tiny country like New Zealand has to trade to survive and those who imagine that we can maintain our present living standards while we live in splendid isolation.
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.