Parker DavidMOTIONSComprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership—Release of TextHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for Trade and Export Growth): I move That this House note that the text of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership has been released and will be signed on 8 March 2013.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! On what date?Hon DAVID PARKER: 8 March 2018.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Yes. You said 2013.Hon DAVID PARKER: Oh I'm sorry sir. Mr Assistant Speaker thank you for that correction.I want to in my 10 minutes refer first to the transparency with which the Government is trying to approach the signature of this agreement and the engagement that we are already having up and down the country before moving to some of the issues around trade that this agreement is relevant to. I want to cover the bottom lines that the Labour Party expounded before the election and how we have to the best of our ability met them and also respond to some of the accusations that are being made that the Government has been hypocritical somehow backing this new Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (CPTPP).First of all I would say that since it became clear that we were making progress in the issues that were important to the Government at Vietnam last year even before we came close to finalisation we have been consulting with the public. We've had meetings up and down the country. We've had information about the increasing number of suspensions to the agreement that were agreed up on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade website. As soon as we reached finalisation of the agreement in Japan about a month ago we sought early release of the final text. That text had to be legally verified then translated then translated back from Spanish and French into English just to make sure that we didn't have different versions of the agreement in different languages which is the problem that we have with the Treaty of Waitangi versions in Māori and English. As soon as that was completed New Zealand was at the forefront of calling for its early release and it was then released. At the same time as we released that text we released in advance of signature the national interest analysis which is a long document that describes the effect of the agreement and the benefits and risks that are inherent in it.In addition to that we've had numerous outreach meetings. I've been involved in a number up and down the country. My officials have been in a lot more. They're open to anyone. People who are in favour of or against the agreement are welcome to come along and we seek to explain to people the effect of the agreement and address questions that are asked. This is a level of transparency and engagement that I think if I could say of the last Minister he also began with after he became trade Minister. I think he recognised that the Minister before him hadn't been as open with the public and one of the reasons why there has been this sort of increasing suspicion of trade agreements in society is that lack of engagement. I thank him for those efforts and I would assure the public that we're open to doing the same thing.In addition I've asked critics of the agreement to give us specifics give us specific questions that they have about the agreement and we've had lists of those questions that have been sent in by groups of civil society who are worried about the agreement and we've endeavoured to give written answers to the questions. Where those written answers have been insufficient for those critics—they say Look there's another angle that we want you to address on this."; we've expressed willingness to do that as well. There is a point beyond which we can't go. We can't do this forever but we're doing our utmost to address the issues that are raised.In respect of trade I think everyone in New Zealand knows that we are a small country that will never produce cars or computers or mobile phones or medicines. You know we might produce the parts for magnetic resonance—we'll never produce all of the medical equipment even if we produce components for it. Therefore we need to sell to the rest of the world things that we need to have a decent standard of living in New Zealand. I've made the point that trade agreements aren't the be-all and end-all of that. We've got fantastic trade agreements already with our two largest trading partners China and Australia—free-trade agreements that have been in place for a while now—and despite that exports in the last 10 years dropped from 30 percent of GDP to 27 percent of the GDP to be contrasted by the last Government's ambition to lift them from 30 to 40 percent of GDP. That proves that trade agreements are not the only thing that's important to trade and there are other settings in the economy like research and development incentives and the tax signal that encourages people to invest in productive enterprise which grows new points of comparative advantage rather than bidding up house prices by investing ever-higher proportions of our investment capital and residential rental investments in Auckland.In terms of the five points that we made clear before the election that we wanted to see were properly protected the first I'll mention is the Treaty clause. We've got fantastic Treaty protection clauses in all of our free-trade agreements. It's the same clause as previously. It's been to the Waitangi Tribunal. They gave it a very good pass. They said it protects the interests of the Government and Māoridom to do anything that's necessary in the name of the Treaty. They said you could tickle it in one or two ways and make it even better but our negotiators made the point that if we did that we would reopen the text of that and we'd likely go backwards in respect of our Treaty clause rather than forward.In respect of Pharmac we said we wanted that better protected. It's true that the prior agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) protected the form of Pharmac; it did though impose additional costs on Pharmac being the cost of medicines on patent longer particularly biologic drugs and also some transparency costs. Those are fixed in CPTPP and no longer apply. In respect of the right to regulate there is no doubt that New Zealand can regulate for public health environment we can run a public education system we can fund our State-owned enterprises and we can have appropriate environmental regulation or safety regulation. There is nowhere that the Government is prevented from properly regulating whether it's for plain packaging of cigarettes or it's for climate change reasons.In respect of land which was our next provision the last Government was saying that we had to choose between either controlling who owns New Zealand's houses or trade agreements. They said you can't have both. They said that to ban foreign buyers of our houses would breach lots of our free-trade agreements and they said that that would cause tens of thousands of job losses. They were wrong—Hon Gerry Brownlee: Tell us about Singapore.Hon DAVID PARKER: —and we've shown how you can do that and we've got legislation that if passed before the CPTPP comes into effect protects New Zealand's interest in that regard. We were told that the alternative was that you could do stamp duty by the Government and therefore we shouldn't be worried about it. They were wrong on that too because that would have breached the South Korean free-trade agreement.Hon Phil Twyford: How could they have got it so wrong?Hon DAVID PARKER: How could they have got it so wrong? I do not know. It's either incompetence or disingenuousness—maybe both. It was election time and we've now shown those claims to be incorrect.In respect of the one complication that we do have in earlier trade agreements the interjection came in "What about Singapore?" It is true that that issue remains unresolved but we are in negotiations with Singapore in an endeavour to reach an acceptable conclusion there. So that leaves in respect of all the issues that we raised including at the protest meetings—I think I went to either one or two. The Opposition accuse me of hypocrisy for now voting for this vastly different agreement. I have to say even when I went to those meetings and I read out the Labour Party's five conditions which are similar to those that are recommended by other parties I was booed by some of the crowds because they didn't think that I was tough enough for them.It is my opinion that we have largely protected the sovereignty risk to New Zealand. The one area that we haven't succeeded completely in is investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses. The new Government agrees that these international dispute tribunals are undesirable. We don't think that a multinational should have a greater right to sue the New Zealand Government than a New Zealand company investing in New Zealand. We've moderated the effect of ISDS clauses in a number of ways. We've excluded commercial contracts with the Government so multinational builds: the Waterview tunnel—previously under the TPP agreement they could have sued the New Zealand Government; under CPTPP they can't. In respect of investment screening they can't bring claims either.In respect of who can sue we've got carve-outs with side agreements. We have a new side agreement with Australia. It's similar to the one we had last time in respect of TPP and that carves 80 percent of foreign direct investment into New Zealand from CPTPP countries so they can't use those tribunals. We've got side letters with other countries that will become clear on 8 March.There are trade benefits. The most obvious trade benefits are in respect of beef. We had no other route to a trade agreement with Japan—a free-trade agreement. Since Australia had their earlier free-trade agreement with Japan a couple of years ago and they have a lower tariff rate for their beef exports into Japan New Zealand's beef exports have dropped 38 percent—38 percent.This is a much better agreement. We have preserved the sovereignty of the New Zealand Parliament to act in the best interests of our people going further whilst getting the trade benefits that were on offer. This is more important than it was before the World Trade Organization was under attack and I'm proud to support this motion."