Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I do want to acknowledge you as the chair of our Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee which is the committee which heard submissions on this trade agreement. I do want to begin by having acknowledged you in the committee acknowledging also that that meant 10 days afforded to the public to prepare and to submit on a 1700 page trade agreement.Now New Zealand needs trade. We are a small island nation. Trade upholds the rule of law internationally; it connects nations; it means that we can exchange culture skill expertise and goods. We do need it and the Green Party understands and commends trade as long as it is fair inclusive and sustainable.Dr Duncan Webb: We agree.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: We do agree on those aims.What we are concerned with and I speak now as a lawyer that has dealt with international instruments is that where you mention the environment—not you Madam Speaker but trade negotiators—where trade agreements and trade deals mention women's rights workers' rights indigenous rights we would like to see those rights expressed in the same binding detailed terms that the rights and privileges of multinational international investors are expressed. And that is not what this agreement represents. We note that there is a Māori trade chapter. We note that the mention of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is in this trade deal. We note that women and workers are mentioned as they were in the so-called Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement—I'll just call it the CTTPPA. That doesn't mean that those groups that those interests and those rights are in fact protected in an international instrument like this in the same way that multinational investors are.I'll begin with the Treaty of Waitangi clause. We know that almost everyone other than the Crown—that includes the Waitangi Tribunal and other groups—have called this particular wording of this clause inadequate" to honour or enforce Te Tiriti o Waitangi. We're not sure why the Crown persists with using the same exact wording why we haven't revisited that.Leaving that to one side and this agreement and others have mentioned this there is a new and a first chapter on Māori trade. I pause because it is a little bit emotional as it will be for others. When we were hearing submissions on this we were meant to hear from the late great Moana Jackson on that chapter on the day of his passing—but we do have the written submission. And what is noted is the inadequacy because there is a protection to some extent of Māori commercial interests of those who are in a position to trade internationally but to say that this protects Te Ao Māori in trade is absolute wrong. The chapter in fact explicitly rejects any recognition by the UK of and I'll read this "Genetic Resources Traditional Knowledge or Traditional Cultural Expressions [in any form] of intellectual property." Does that accord with Te Ao Māori understanding of the world or our own understanding of what it means to honour protect and enforce Te Tiriti o Waitangi? It does not.So then there are the workers' rights there are the environmental chapters—and we know because our negotiators sometimes told us when they appeared before us as a committee—they are set in separate chapters enunciated in aspirational terms. And I say again as a lawyer that that does not make them enforceable. We in fact know that wording from the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) we know it from other agreements and we know that when the CPTPP came into effect with very very similar wording for the protection of workers' rights and environmental rights that about 86 percent of cases would fail to enforce environmental protections or workers' rights.Now we know that this agreement sets a baseline. So with workers' rights for example yes it does protect us from being pressured into lowering those rights in our legislation or policy by future Governments. But it doesn't protect us against the pressure of being sued by multinational international investors if we want to improve workers' rights protections or environmental protections. What that looks like in reality and it happened in Australia and it's quite a nice demonstration of that is when you want to put warnings for example on cigarette packets—now that's not in this but in a similar way if we wanted to improve our workers' rights in a way that risked the profit margins of multinational international investors we'd be in trouble. So yeah it protects the bottom line of environmental protection and workers' rights maybe—we'd have to test that. But it certainly—certainly—risks future Governments' abilities to improve those rights. That's undemocratic.So coming to democracy when it comes to free-trade agreements and to trade deals generally this is a deal that was negotiated in secret. The consultation mechanisms that we talk about—in terms of Māori at least—were engaging Crown entities and representatives and consulting with Māori without talking about the actual terms that were on the table without talking about the mandate of negotiators without a guarantee that those consultations would ever be taken into account. And how good would it ever be as a consultation mechanism if the people being consulted with have no idea what they're feeding back into? What does that look like? What's on the table? What's off the table?So yeah there were conversations but the trade deal itself was negotiated in secret the terms were done in secret and then once we knew anything about it we gave people 10 days to come to select committee. That all goes against the Government's own—and this was last term to be fair but it is a Labour Government and a Labour-led Government last term that set into place the Trade for All agenda consultation and the expert group. They came back with a very clear recommendation that the national impact statement should be done by an independent entity—it wasn't—that there should be more democratic transparency around the way that trade agreements are negotiated and the way that the consultations are done. That wasn't there.So we're dealing with an international instrument that has had input and direct negotiating rights from multinational investors who are impacted but not the New Zealand public. But that binds this and future Governments in terms of the policy that we can make and upholding Te Tiriti o Waitangi workers' rights women's rights environmental protections and our ability to meet our climate targets. That isn't right. That isn't a sustainable fair and inclusive trade agreement and for those reasons the Green Party does not commend this to the House."