Curran Clare: Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6821. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): There have been some very good contributions to the second reading debate on this bill particularly from my two colleagues David Parker and Phil Goff. Also I particularly want to acknowledge the contribution of Russel Norman to the debate on this billlast week. Sadly though there have been some very poor contributions—the worst of them coming from National MP David Bennett who last week unleashed a deeply personal attack on Phil Goff and on Labour New Zealand First and the Greensalso. He could not string an argument together so he resorted to juvenile name-calling. It is members like him who give this Parliament the debate in this House and politics in general a bad name.I just want to touch on the two main points that David Parker made in his contribution which are relevant to my contribution. This is the only time that we will get to debate this free-trade agreement in this Parliament so the quality of the debate is very important. I think that the quality of the debate from the Labour side and from the Greens and New Zealand First has been very thoughtful. They have been willing to engage in debate. Unfortunately I have not seen a lot of that from the other side of the House.Labour supports this bill because we have come to the conclusion that it is on balance about right. The thing about this that really annoys the Government is that Labour has negotiated better trade agreements than it has and we are prepared to stand up and articulate clearly what our bottom lines are and to say what we will support and what we will not support and with a lot of credibility behind that. That really annoys the Government and that is why you get the likes of David Bennett who just hurled abuse because really he could not come up with an argument.The Labour Party accepts that the South Korean free-trade agreement substantially reduces the tariffs currently faced by New Zealand exporters to South Korea. Currently our exporters are suffering substantial disadvantages when competing with sellers to South Korea from other countries that pay lower tariffs because their earlier trade agreements have already reduced tariffs. That is the main basis for our support. We support growing our trade and we support exports. This is another thing that National is not so good at—that is growing the percentage of exports. Just today it was revealed that the ratio of exports to GDP is at its lowest since 1997. The target was 40 percent of GDP then; right now it is at just 28 percent. So it is really not much to write home about.If you are going to take advantage of these free-trade agreements then really you have got to put the effort in behind the scenes to boost the industries that are exporting. I am a champion of the tech export industry which accounts for about 7 percent of our GDP more than 124000 jobs and growth of 16.5 percent a year. But we could be doing a lot more to grow jobs in this sector. In particular I would just like to touch on the video gaming industry which is one of our fastest-growing tech sectors—83 percent of that sector is exported. It could do with just a little bit of help from this Government such as getting the post-production digital and visual effects scheme and qualifying for that 20 percent rebate which it cannot get access to. That is something that this Government could be doing.We acknowledge the concerns of submitters on this bill. We will not blindly support free-trade agreements like this Government does but also we will not blindly oppose them. We negotiate good ones and point out the flaws. We know that there has been a botch-up in this bill but we say that on balance we support it. Our biggest concern is the lack of engagement with civil society.