Coates BarryBARRY COATES (Green): I move That the motion be amended by replacing now" with "this day 3 months". This is a deferral motion which recognises that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement will not come into force and will not be agreed by the requisite 85 percent of TPP countries with GDP of 85 percent or more for several years at least. I think this deferral motion would prevent a further waste of time in providing legislation for an agreement that may never happen. If we look at the dynamics within other countries internationally we see that the tide has turned. The tide has turned against agreements like the TPP. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly a deferral would give time for research and consultation not to improve the TPP agreement—because in our view it is a flawed model—but to develop sufficient research and consensus around an alternative and better model.It is with some sadness that I am talking about the TPP agreement today. It has been a long and we would say rather unedifying process. There has been extreme secrecy in the negotiations of this agreement over the 6 years of negotiations. The text was not made available to members of the public or even to experts except it should be said it was made available to major multinational companies which were represented on the delegations of the US and other countries.In New Zealand we have heard that there were around 10000 submissions from members of the public but the question is: what was the response to those 10000 submissions? What we see is that a draft report from the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee was shown in an Official Information Act response to have been significantly changed and the Government majority report actually ignored most of the issues raised by those submitters. So to talk about an adequate consultation process confuses the process of actually speaking with being listened to and there is no evidence that the Government has listened to all of the people across this country who are concerned about the TPP agreement.So why are people concerned? One of the aspects is that this is an agreement that primarily is not about trade as people understand it. It is not about tariffs and quotas and our external relationships with countries. This is an agreement that is primarily about domestic regulation and the workings of the New Zealand economy and what we see is that there are very very few economic benefits for New Zealand in the TPP agreement. An analysis that was undertaken on the economics of the TPP agreement which was a peer-reviewed report showed that around a 1 percent increase in gross national product by 2030 was projected by the Government compared with 47 percent that would have occurred without a TPP agreement. That was according to Government figures and those Government figures included highly speculative assumptions that have subsequently been challenged in that research report and by a number of other reports including the United States Government report the International Trade Commission report which directly criticised many of the measures that were used in the framing of the New Zealand analysis. So the economics of the TPP agreement have not been done in a convincing way at all.The Government often quotes figures around what the economic benefit would be. There is no substantive basis for those figures. Meanwhile the issues that many submitters care about have been completely ignored in the analysis. People are worried about the environment they are worried about workers' rights they are worried about the powers of local government they are worried about the rights of Māori under Te Tiriti and they are worried about the state of our public services. There have been research reports on each of these issues and those research reports have substantiated why there should be concern. At the heart of that concern are the restrictions in the TPP agreement on the Government's right to regulate in the public interest. That is what the TPP agreement is about; it is restricting the rights of the Government to regulate not only foreign companies but New Zealand business as well.So we have an agreement that imposes no responsibilities and no regulation on international companies many of which are able to operate behind tax havens and by using dubious ways to avoid tax but they gain significant rights under the TPP agreement. Those rights include the investor-State dispute settlement which is perhaps the single most resonant issue for most New Zealanders. They understand that a foreign corporation if it has its profitability adversely impacted by a regulation in New Zealand does have the right to take our Government to an international tribunal. They understand that the processes currently used in international arbitration in these arbitral tribunals have been called some of the worst judicial processes in the world. They understand that what is happening here is that a foreign corporation is allowed to take our Government to a shoddy international tribunal over policies that are democratically decided and determined to be in the interests of the New Zealand people. Members of the public reject that.I should say that the polls show that a majority of the New Zealand public is against it. The most credible research was done by TV3 and Reid Research in November 2015 and it found that of the people who know about the TPP agreement 60 percent oppose the agreement. So we have a picture here where a majority of the public are being denied an opportunity to express their views on the TPP agreement. We have a series of so-called consultations that do not listen to people and we have seen in New Zealand people responding to that. We have seen protests around the country we have seen rallies we have seen people mobilising we have seen massive petitions and there is a deep amount of concern over this agreement. Just this morning a hīkoi came to Parliament—Rachel Thomas and her three children Tema Pita and Jai—having walked from Christchurch to make a point about their opposition to the TPP agreement.New Zealanders care deeply about this agreement. They do not want to give up our sovereignty and democratic rights. They do not want the Government's right to regulate in the public interest to be compromised under this agreement particularly since there are few if any economic benefits. I would put this into an international context and say that the international tide is turning away from these agreements. The European Union will not accept these investor-State dispute settlement panels any more. What we have seen is that the parallel agreement to the TPP agreement being negotiated between the US and EU is in the process of being rejected and 3 million European citizens have mobilised against it. We see economic history that has many times defeated similar agreements such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment which was considered by New Zealand. The agreement collapsed in 1998. There were two attempts to put these sets of investor rights issues into the World Trade Organization and this collapsed the meetings of Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003.The tide has turned. We need alternatives. The Green Party's views and our views on the alternatives are set out in our minority view in the select committee report. We oppose this bill. We oppose ratification of the TPP agreement. But we stand to work together with other political parties and members of the public in developing far better alternatives for the good of New Zealand business for the good of the New Zealand public and for the good of our planet. Thank you."