English Bill: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 15 May 2008. Volume:647;Page:16033. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 Along with my colleagues I rise to support the further progress of this legislation on the free-trade agreement with China. The events of the last couple of months sum up our sometimes ambivalent attitude as reflected in this debate to China and its opportunities. On the one hand there has been a great deal of concern about the way in which the independence movement in Tibet has been dealt with. On the other hand we cannot help but empathise with those tens of thousands of people who have been caught in a major earthquake in China. The pictures of it are transmitted to us every day. It makes the Chinese people more real than do some of the generalised ways in which we have thought about them in the past.  
This free-trade agreement has I think been something of a challenge for many New Zealanders. They have had to understand from their own points of view the right balance between the opportunities that are created by the fastest-growing economy in the world—certainly the one with which we have the closest connections—on the one hand and on the other hand the underlying concern that if we get too close to the dragon then some harm will come to us.  
I was pleased to see that the Government did not resort to its knee-jerk reflexes which it demonstrated in recent months when a Chinese company bid for the lines company in Wellington. There was a time when that move may have been very controversial but for once Labour was a bit responsible in the way it dealt with it. I have to say though that I am still somewhat bemused that Labour regarded a Canadian bid for part of Auckland airport with a great deal of hostility and perhaps political opportunism yet it showed almost no interest in what was happening with the Chinese bid for our power lines.  
This free-trade agreement will be one of the ways in which New Zealand gets used to a permanent and growing aspect of its future—that is a relationship with China which has a culture completely different from our own but which is also well represented here in New Zealand. I hope that this agreement will encourage New Zealanders and New Zealand businesses to see the local Chinese community in a new light as a strategic asset as a group of people who know well and understand well the fastest-growing economy in the world and also as an economy that has volunteered to lower its barriers to our products. Any scrutiny of the detail of this agreement shows just how far the Chinese Government has gone in lowering its barriers to our products including a whole range of tariffs applying to forest products dairy meat seafood exports fruit vegetables and wool. Barriers to selling those products to China will virtually disappear in some cases over the next 10 years.  
As my colleague Luamanuvao Winnie Laban just said the global is local. In my own community I have a large sawmill that has traditionally sold sawn timber to factories in China that produce toilet seats. There is absolutely no doubt that if that arrangement is still in place when this free-trade agreement comes into effect then the people in my electorate who are competing in the global economy will do much better out of it.  
We acknowledge the efforts of the Government and its trade negotiators in obtaining what has to be seen as a good deal for New Zealand. It is a deal that hopefully China will strike with other countries. It has also set a standard for the kinds of agreements New Zealand might itself seek from other countries.  
It is quite important in the light of this agreement for New Zealanders to take more than an ambivalent view about overseas investment in New Zealand and New Zealand investment overseas. All the economic evidence tells us that if we are open to overseas investment here then we will get better at investing overseas because we learn how people do business differently and we learn new methods and new technologies. The growth of this economy our economic prospects and the prospects for the wages and incomes of New Zealanders will be critically determined over the next decade by our attitudes towards the opportunities created by this free-trade agreement and by our attitudes towards people who want to invest in New Zealand. In both cases we ought to be positive.  
There is no doubt that this free-trade agreement will create a beachhead in China that we must exploit. If we are to have a step-up in New Zealand’s economic performance then certainly part of that step-up will come from a successful export sector selling at higher prices in markets that are willing to pay those prices. We see the early signs of it with the big impact that the demand of the Chinese middle class is having on food prices: food prices that we have traditionally assumed would always go down are going up. That signals to us the scope and size of the opportunity that this free-trade agreement represents. National is happy to support the further progress of this bill.