Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. In the past the Green Party has often been the lone voice in Parliament when it comes to some of the concerns around free-trade agreements (FTAs) and I just want to reflect on what some of our concerns have been over the course of the last several decades as the country has entered into a number of these agreements. I'm saying this because I think it's important that we do have dissenting voices and that we test the quality of our agreements against those standards. Some of the concerns that we've raised over the course of many many years are things like investor-State dispute settlement mechanisms. That was probably the single most significant provision that actually caused I think probably a breakdown in the general social consensus around trade agreements. The idea was that an individual company would be able to take the New Zealand Government to court and overturn for example environmental regulations and provisions and so on. When you look at how investor-State dispute settlement mechanisms have been applied through history the vast majority of them were on environmental grounds and the vast majority of them found in favour of the litigant and overturned environmental provisions and so contributed to the general breakdown of our environment which we all depend on for our survival whilst expanding economic growth. So that was probably the key thing that we'd been worried about and we were worried about it with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and several other agreements.The second one was around intellectual property rights. We were worried that New Zealand artists or creators or software developers and so on would be unfairly disadvantaged by some of the intellectual property rights provisions that we found in some of those agreements. The Hon Damien O'Connor mentioned Pharmac which has been under pressure in a number of sets of trade agreements. Those were provisions that were written into a number of previous trade agreements.Then there were also provisions that weren't written into previous trade agreements that we wanted to see. Historically our trade agreements pulled in the opposite direction of our environmental obligations of our human rights or our indigenous obligations and rights and interests and so on. So the lack of enforceable provisions in those trade agreements when you consider the balance against the things that we didn't like that were also in them we were never able to support a trade agreement on that set of grounds.Now when the Government changed in 2017 the trade Minister at the time the Hon David Parker started the Trade for All initiative and did a huge amount of work trying to get New Zealanders back on board and develop a set of common principles that would inform trade agreements. That then provided the basis for a number of negotiations including the EU FTA that's in front of us tonight. I want to acknowledge that work that was then continued on by the Hon Damien O'Connor in this and other agreements as well.The EU FTA doesn't contain most of the things that we've historically previously been worried about and it does contain some of the things that we wanted to see in those trade agreements such as enforceable provisions around climate and the environment. So it would be inconsistent of us not to support the EU FTA given that the very things that we had previously been concerned about have actually been reversed in this agreement. This is quite a different agreement from those that we have seen previously.Now that's not to say that we don't have concerns; we do and we look forward to examining those in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee in the coming weeks as we get to that. We're particularly concerned about Māori rights and interests. I want to respect the fact that there were hundreds of Māori advisers and negotiators involved in this. So I respect that they arrived at a point that they were satisfactory but we do want to pay attention to that and we do want to test those provisions that are in this agreement to show that they actually deliver on the promise that it's not just all sizzle but there's actually some vegetarian sausage involved in that as well. So given that the Green Party will be supporting the EU FTA given the huge shift in the nature of this agreement over previous agreements.