Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to answer my colleague Simon O'Connor's question: to maintain the Greens' principled and substantive opposition to this trade agreement. The stated aim of the PACER-Plus agreement is to provide benefits to the development of Pacific nations. That would be a trade agreement that we would be very happy to support. But in reality the previous Government's pursuit of this agreement at any cost has resulted in an agreement that threatens some of the most unique but vulnerable nations in the world: our Pacific neighbours. This trade agreement undermines the interests of the majority of the Island nations who have joined—their social equity their environment and their cultural heritage. PACER-Plus is a trade agreement that involves Australia New Zealand and a handful of small Island nations. It's 16 years in the making. It's designed to have those countries drop tariffs on most goods being imported from Australia and New Zealand and for them to rewrite their regulations for us to much more easily pressure them into privatising their core State-owned enterprises—for deregulation for them to drop policies that would protect domestic innovation and to make it harder or impossible for those nations to trade with countries outside of the zone. It's very difficult to see what benefit there is to the Island nations signing on to this agreement. Like the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) that New Zealand entered into just a couple of weeks ago this is an agreement that's far less about trade and far more about impeding Governments from regulating big foreign business—this time ours and Australia's. PACER-Plus rather than creating free and fair trade to help development and stability in the Island nations undermines those nations' sovereignty. It's much more about ensuring unfair and unfettered advantage to us. We gain privileged access to Pacific markets while they gain no new access to our markets—for example nowhere in this agreement is Australia and New Zealand required to drop our protectionist policies against the export by those nations of fruit and vegetables that are also grown here. While New Zealand exporters will gain a small benefit in the dropped tariffs by our standards we deprive Governments who are already struggling to provide basic healthcare and education for their populations. The supposed gain for the Pacific nations is that 20 percent of New Zealand's already allocated aid budget will go to Aid for Trade. Now according to the mandate of the New Zealand aid programme aid should be for the promotion of sustainable development and poverty alleviation not to sweeten trade deals. That is not new money that is going to the Pacific; that's money that's being reallocated from helping with their education system and their healthcare system—money that would have prioritised growing social equity—that's now just going to go to big business. All it's doing is helping those businesses—urban centres—to have access to our markets. It's not going to benefit those Island nations in combating climate change for example or helping them to bring about gender equity—the types of things that our aid programme would otherwise focus on. For this illusory benefit and ill-placed pay-off the Pacific nations are threatened with forced privatisation. This means that their telecoms their ports and their airports are now vulnerable to forced privatisation—something that comes from an archaic neo-liberal world order that we saw collapse and cause catastrophic loss in the last global financial crisis. Now it's being enforced against our Pacific neighbours by us. This deal will also cause food insecurity to rise in the Pacific as privatisation of family-owned land where families grow crops and feed themselves will threaten that source of food. It will also open up their markets to cheaper food produced offshore that's far less healthy contributing to a rise in already pandemic proportions of diabetes and obesity that these nations are facing and combating. All this for some small amount of tariff gain by us—taking that away from struggling Governments. Now it will be of no surprise to find that like the negotiations of the CPTPP the negotiations for PACER-Plus were done in secret with very little consultation though they do affect the vital interests of the Pacific people. There's been some talk—and the Minister himself said that it is paternalistic to criticise the ability of the Pacific nations to maintain their sovereignty in those negotiations. An example of how that was in fact undermined is that because these small nations did not have enough experienced negotiators among them the negotiators used by the Pacific nations in this negotiation process were paid for by Australia and New Zealand. The lead negotiator was a Ghanaian an Australian-educated negotiator who had no experience of the complexities of the economies of the Island nations. That is the level of disparity in power involved in this negotiation process done in secret. The text of the agreement was not released until very recently. The PACER-Plus negotiations took some 16 years and even then the two largest economies in the Pacific Fiji and Papua New Guinea did not join. They knew that this deal was not in their best interests. Vanuatu is still deciding so only 14 percent of Pacific Island people are actually involved in this trade deal—something that is a blow to Pacific cohesion and regionalism that New Zealand has invested huge amounts of aid in in the past as have other donors over the years. So as a reasonable responsible regional actor and as a Pacific capital why are we contributing to undermining stability and cohesion in these communities by pushing them further into abject poverty through gaining an unfair buck? For all the real damage and loss of trust that we engender through this deal it is unlikely to be in our collective best interests in our Pacific neighbourhood. We are undermining democracy. We are pushing for privatisation. We are pushing communities who are already poor and struggling further into poverty by bullying their Governments into an unfair trade deal. That is why the Green Party does not support this deal. It's not in the collective best interests of New Zealand Australia or the Pacific.