Street Maryan: Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Street Maryan: Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5286] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I move  
That the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.  
I am pleased to bring this bill the Customs and Excise (Prohibition of Imports Made by Slave Labour) Amendment Bill to the House this evening. Slavery was abolished in Britain in the nineteenth century and the ban on slavery is a foundation stone of modern international human rights law. It is unambiguously prohibited by international law and the few Governments that tolerate it can be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Despite this the evil of slavery continues with estimates ranging from 12 million to 29 million people enslaved. Despite bans in law I am advised that hereditary slavery continues in Mauritania and Niger while the use of child slaves is widespread in parts of West Africa. There are regular cases from Asia of parents selling their children into slavery and debt slavery continues to occur in parts of the Asian subcontinent and in South America. 
Banning the fruits of this vile traffic is a moral imperative and moral necessity. We live in the 21st century. Globalisation has brought trading partners closer together and opened up opportunities for the exchange of goods on a scale not known before. Just recently in this House we passed legislation enabling the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand free-trade agreement to proceed thereby opening up huge markets to rapidly reducing tariffs for our exporters. But globalised trade does not happen in a moral vacuum and that is the starting point for my bill. Although I am a strong supporter of free trade for many reasons not the least of them being that I believe New Zealanders’ quality of life is dependent upon the wealth and the jobs created from tradable commodities and services I do not believe in trade at any price. Trade must occur at the right price a fair price and an ethical price. Fair trade and ethical trade are the starting points for this debate. 
This bill presents the New Zealand Parliament with an opportunity to explore in good faith how free trade and human rights might be accommodated in a principled and thoughtful way. Earlier this year the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee considered the petition of Geoff White on behalf of Trade Aid and 17000 others requesting just this: that the House legislate against the importation of products made by slave labour. The question was considered and reported back to the House with a Green Party view expressing a desire for legislation. The conversation around this issue has continued within the Labour Party since that time along the lines that notwithstanding any practical difficulties of attestation proof and enforcement it was still worthwhile to bring a bill to a select committee for consideration investigation and amendment where appropriate. 
There is no doubt that this bill represents an idealistic position but I do not make any apology for that. It is not the first idealistic position I have adopted and I hope it will not be the last one. The mechanism for achieving the ends sought in this bill is the addition of a definition of “slave labour” to the definition clause of the Customs and Excise Act 1996 and the insertion of another clause into schedule 1 of that Act. These are modest proposals. I have no interest in scoring points on this issue. I seek in good faith to present a bill before the House that we can debate in a select committee where improvement can be made in order that New Zealand can stand up and say that our law bans the importation of goods produced by slave labour. There would not be a member in this House who would for a moment support slave labour or the fruits of it; not one member in this House I am sure. [ 
Interruption 
]. Perhaps one has just walked in. This bill is being brought forward without any sense of positioning or point-scoring in mind. I have only the desire to bring to the fore a discussion about an ethical and a morally based position on trade in this Parliament. 
Although international trade rules for example GATT do not contain specific permission to ban goods produced by slavery they allow measures necessary to protect public morals human life and health or to ban goods produced by prison labour which is article 20 of GATT. Schedule 1 of the Customs and Excise Act 1996 which this bill seeks to amend accordingly states that “Goods manufactured or produced wholly or in part by prison labour” are prohibited goods. The same efforts and mechanisms that are used to enforce that statute might be used to enforce the provisions of this bill. In fact examination at the select committee might produce even better mechanisms than the ones we have. I do not have a monopoly on that wisdom. I was not a member of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee at the time it considered the original petition from Trade Aid. But as I say the conversation has continued within the Labour Party around this matter since that time. The United States has the Tariff Act of 1930 which unambiguously bars the entry of goods produced by any form of forced labour including slave and child labour. Belgium has a Government-endorsed voluntary social label which producers can sign up to that declares absolutely that their goods are not produced by slave labour. So there are two models already out there in the international arena that we could consider more closely in the application to New Zealand legislation. 
We should all aspire to a global economic system that trades sustainably and ethically. I do not believe this is pie-in-the-sky legislation. I believe that all of us should look beyond current structures current economic systems and current constraints to a world where we know that what we consume has not been produced by means of “labour by persons over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” That is the definition I seek to include in the amendment to the Customs and Excise Act. That is a definition of slavery that echoes the wording of the 1926 Slavery Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. New Zealand is a party to both of those pieces of international law. Let us see whether we can find a way to make our universal undoubted commitment to the abolition of slavery in all its forms practical in our trading relationships. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: The member must indicate under Standing Order 279 which select committee the bill will be referred to should it be successful. 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: As a sequel to my penultimate sentence as it were I seek that this bill be referred to the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee for consideration.