Groser Tim: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Groser Tim: International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:642;Page:11814] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 I want to take a brief call just to give a view about what I think is the bigger picture here because my first mokopuna was born about 16 weeks ago and she has moved already in 16 weeks from living in London to living in Hong Kong. That is the world she will grow up in but I hope obviously that she will become a New Zealander and will make a contribution here somewhere 20 years down the track. But the world that she and our other grandchildren—or for the younger members of the House our kids who are growing up and in primary schools now—will be living in is going to be fundamentally different from the world that I as a child grew up in some decades ago. This world will be different for a number of reasons but one of its absolute marked features is the rise in the importance of developing countries and this bill is ultimately related to that broader purpose. 
People of my generation have lived in a world that has been culturally and economically dominated by developed countries. The world in which my grandchild will be living will be totally different. It will not be dominated by developing countries because many of the countries that I have in mind when I make this point will no longer be considered then to be developing countries in any real sense of the word. It will be a much more diverse world and it will be a world I believe fundamentally that will be fairer that will involve far less poverty and that is already coming into view. It will be a world in which much will shift in favour of what we today call developing countries. 
In trade that is obvious; in emissions if we are looking at the future of a post-2012 Kyoto convention we see that at the moment around 60 percent of all emissions comes from developed countries. By 2040 that will change around almost exactly to the other side of the coin to where two-thirds of emissions according to the UN framework convention will be likely to come from what are called today developing countries. So this is part of a process. This clause which is designed to promote the development of these countries is a small piece of that puzzle. 
I believe that an enormous majority of New Zealanders have great sympathy for people in developing countries. Personally I am hugely discomfited by their problems of acute poverty and their lack of access to adequate food nutrition and education. But we obviously have differences of view in our community from that shared base about how best to address those issues. The differences are less acute now than 30 or 40 years ago when I look back on the debates I was involved in then but they are still replicated in this House in academic discussions and in media articles. 
They are basically the same two views and this bill puts them into that context. One view is that the global economy out there is a problem for developing country folk and that they must assert their control more clearly. They must try to keep out investment and keep out imports. That is the old import substitution model. In respect of this particular bill—the International Finance Agreements Amendment Bill—that model puts heavy restrictions on inward foreign investment. The other view—I will not labour the point—is obvious: it is growth as a non - zero-sum game. If developing countries open their economies to the ideas technology—and in this case investment flows—and join in international multilateral co-operative agreements such as this agency we are debating has this bill will work in their favour. Obviously I subscribe to that view and this is why National is supporting this bill. 
If members reflect on the empirical evidence over the last 30 or 40 years I believe that they will see that that view is unmistakably correct. We are now seeing a world in which far from the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer developing countries as a group—without exception including those countries that are going backwards usually in Sub-Saharan Africa but also those other countries where there are massive problems—have been growing cumulatively about twice as fast over the last 20 years as the sum of all developed countries. Massive shifts are taking place in favour of developing countries in terms of world trade flows. In 1986 at the beginning of the launch of the previous multilateral trade round a mere 24 percent of developing country exports went from those developing countries to each other. In other words it was fair perhaps 25 years ago to see this as a north-south conflictual situation. When the Doha round was launched in 2000—24 years on—nearly 50 percent of developing country exports went from developing countries to each other. 
We are now seeing the rise of the two giant developing countries India and China which literally represent half of humanity. They have linked into the global economy and turned back from the earlier economic and political models of rigid control total obsession with their sovereignty and resistance to agencies exactly such as this. They have embraced inward foreign investment and outside ideas and have lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty. 
So this bill—highly technical as it is—fits into what I think is one of the big stories of the world that my own grandchildren and younger members’ children will be living in. It is a world that will be very very different and it is a world awash with opportunities—both for New Zealand and for the individuals who have the skills and equipment to actually participate in it. Thank you.