Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Madam Speaker. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): I call Golriz Ghahraman. Hon Member: She's up. GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Sorry—it is a pleasure to stand at the right slot to speak to this bill at its third reading. We've heard a lot about this being a gold standard in trade and I'll come back to that because ambition is good. But first to say that we need trade. New Zealand is a small Island nation. We are far away from much of the world and we do rely on trade. We need the goods the produce our kai moana to be the resource that it can be for our people. We also need to bring in the things that we don't have from elsewhere in the world.So trade is good; it underpins a multilateral international culture that we support and we rely on. It underpins a rules-based international order and trade agreements like this reflect that. They reflect a deep generational development of international law that comes through trade probably most strongly and I say that as a human rights lawyer because our laws there aren't all that hard in enforceability. But trade is and it reflects what we can be as an international community.The thing though that sticks for us as the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is that trade must also be sustainable. It must serve the interests of climate and our people because we do face a global crisis that can actually undermine our wellbeing in every way not just economically. So we need to know that these very binding all-encompassing international law documents like this free-trade agreement also support us to face that other global existential crisis.People talk about how we shouldn't include too much in these trade agreements and we should leave out the workers' rights provision and the human rights provision and the environmental chapter. But that ignores the fact that these agreements already in the investor chapter—the really detailed thousands-and-thousands-of-words bit—impact our environmental protections and our workers' rights our human rights. It's already in there. We can't ignore that. Those rights and privileges of the investors of the multinationals of the foreign investors are protected in very enforceable legal language.In similar agreements and this one does differ from the likes of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) but it's very similar in the language of the investor chapter and in the language of the environmental chapter so I want to compare the way that enforcement has rolled out in that context—86 percent of cases under the CPTPP with a similar environmental chapter were to enforce investors' rights over environmental protections that Governments had tried to implement after that agreement had been entered into for their nation. So in Indonesia they had to abandon a ban on particularly harmful types of mining in their national forests because they couldn't afford the payout of a foreign investor suing them for their profit losses. That's why we get worked up about these trade agreements because they do guarantee enforceable rights for foreign investors that tie the hands of Houses of Representatives like this one in the future.We don't know how they continue to influence Governments because not everything is litigated but it becomes a consideration that will sit with Governments from now on over and above the movements in Aotearoa for environmental protection for climate action for workers' rights—fair pay agreements—and for human rights. So we do need to look carefully and we do need to acknowledge that that impact is already there.It's nice that there is a preamble nod to things like Māori rights Te Tiriti o Waitangi and environmental issues. It's nice that there's a chapter there and a line but they don't meet the standards of our Trade for All agenda which the previous Government—with Greens in there as confidence and supply partners which we are no longer—committed to. It's a little disappointing that we would commit so much resource from our experts across sectors including trade experts to sit down and come up with what sustainable trade looks like for Aotearoa in the future—that they would detail that and that we would ignore it. So that's why this gold standard agreement falls short. It doesn't even accord with our own trade for all agenda not on the environmental chapter not on the Māori protections. I will come to democracy: it doesn't accord with what those experts and sector-based people told us we need and the Government previously agreed to meet in terms of democratic engagement in the making of trade agreements. The Minister has said that this has had thorough parliamentary scrutiny. Well actually the bill has but the trade agreement that underpins it—that already bound us to draft this bill in exactly the way that it was drafted—was drafted negotiated and agreed upon in secret without parliamentary scrutiny without the type of scrutiny that the Trade for All agenda prescribes.So we're still falling short. We know because we saw it written—though unfortunately we weren't able to hear him—from the late great Moana Jackson that there wasn't really any Māori involvement or input in the substance of what it would mean to meet Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations in trade in this agreement. So we can't say that a gold standard this is because it's only a gold standard by comparison to previous agreements that fell so short as to actively cause a global financial crisis. That's what we're trying to move past. We're trying to acknowledge that trade agreements negotiated in secret—that benefit and protect only the interests of extremely elite multinational foreign traders—don't work to sustain economies they don't sustain our environment they don't sustain our workers and they certainly don't meet the standards that we need to meet if we are to decolonise.So yes this is with the UK. We have a close relationship with them—that's where that relationship comes from. So upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi or falling short is now the defining factor in a new relationship with the United Kingdom. We can't just rest on what has passed because what has passed has been generations of breach. We can't just rest on there being a like-mindedness when we face our next global existential crisis which is the climate crisis. We need to act differently now and this doesn't quite measure up. It's good—it has good intentions and I'm glad people are trying—but it's disappointing that we have a Trade for All agenda that sits there. It is the gold standard and we're so happy still to fall this far short. So unfortunately I won't be commending these bills to the House.