Genter Julie Anne: Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 16 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4419. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I rise to speak on the Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill. This bill amends New Zealand’s law to ensure implementation of the free-trade agreement that has been negotiated between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea. I guess it does two things which I have not heard many of the speakers refer to. It enacts the preferential traffic rates as per the free-trade agreement and it establishes transitional safeguard measures to be applied on imports. So it is very specific. It is not actually voting on the agreement itself. Parliament unfortunately does not have the opportunity to vote on that. We had only limited ability to scrutinise the agreement once it had already been negotiated as is the case with most of our trade agreements. So the Green Party has to use this particular bill to raise concerns that are more general about this particular free-trade agreement.I have to respond to the previous speaker David Bennett who accused the Green Party of being completely against free trade and saying we would not vote for a trade agreement even if my colleague Dr Kennedy Graham had authored the agreement himself. I have to say there is a lot of heavy rhetoric coming from the Government benches about this agreement and about free trade in general and a lot of rhetoric as well about the position of the Green Party. As is often the case our actual position is far more nuanced and the benefits and disbenefits of trade agreements are far more complicated than the Government members would ever admit or perhaps understand. The Green Party is absolutely for trade. We are a trading nation and if anything we would like to increase the number of exports and the value of our exports in the world. Unfortunately the current Government’s policy is not supporting growth in exports. Although it had very ambitious targets to grow exports to something like 40 percent of GDP they have actually declined since it came into power and it has revised its targets downwards so that it can be closer to meeting them. But we do have real concerns with many of the free-trade agreements that have been negotiated by this Government and previous Governments including this one.Firstly I will just say that we are disappointed that we do not have the opportunity to debate these and scrutinise these properly in Parliament because it is I think a really important role for parliamentarians to have some say over these sorts of agreements. Our biggest concern of course with this particular agreement—although I acknowledge that there could potentially be benefits for certain exporters here in New Zealand and we welcome those benefits—is that the text also includes investor-State dispute mechanisms. The problem with those processes is that they actually start to give more weight to the interests of foreign investors than to the people of New Zealand and we have real concerns about that—about the impact on sovereignty and about the impact for us to democratically design laws that will protect our environment safeguard public health and enable us to control the out-of-control housing market in Auckland.The reality is that those are not necessary to reduce the barriers of trade. The investor-State dispute mechanisms have nothing to do with reducing barriers to trade. They have everything to do with protecting big multinational corporates from being regulated by other Governments and that is a huge problem for democracy. It is a huge problem for all of us in the world—the people of Korea the people of the United States the people of New Zealand who would like to see real action on environmental degradation who would like to see real action on climate change and who would like to protect public health from companies like tobacco companies who benefit of course and profit from selling misery to people. It should be the democratic right of people to put in place policies that protect public health and that protect the environment.I will finish with a quote from the Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman who is pretty lukewarm on many of the trade deals that are being negotiated at the moment including the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. He says that almost everyone exaggerates the importance of trade policy. Although comparative advantage was correct and very important at the beginning the truth is once markets are fairly open we get very very small gains from opening them further. It is relatively so.David Shearer: Where’s the evidence?JULIE ANNE GENTER: The evidence is that there are not usually the benefits that are used to sell these agreements in the first place. We can just look across the Ditch to Australia where a review of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements found that overall the cost to the Australian economy slightly outweighed the benefits. So the benefits of these agreements are being exaggerated. There are huge threats to our ability to regulate in the future and it is for that reason the Green Party will not be supporting this bill at first reading.