Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I appreciate the enthusiasm of my colleagues across the House. I also would like to acknowledge you Madam Speaker as the chair of our Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee in working with us so diligently on trade issues that often happen under some great secrecy. It's often hard to get information and we try our best to act as a parliamentary oversight mechanism together across the House. Of course we also have to deal with all the submitters with all the love and care that they bring to these issues and often it's with great frustration that those members of our community come to our committee.I know that others across the House tonight have raised that great big umbrella trade agreement that we all talk about now as either an incredible win or an incredible win that already existed or whatever it is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). I want to start there too because the previous Labour-led Government last term agreed and signed on to the comprehensive progressive" TPP as I will always call it minutes into becoming Government. It was a shock. It was a shock because many of us had stood shoulder to shoulder to protest that agreement and because the Government did pass it—and there is a connection with this bill I am getting to—we ended up having the Government agree to the Trade for All agenda. That was forming an expert community-led Māori-led environmentalist union-led body that would tell our Government and future Governments what fair sustainable trade should look like. The Government agreed that all future trade agreements would abide by the recommendations of the Trade for All agenda.That came about because of the CPTPP because that agreement did not meet those baseline standards. It represented a trade agreement that came from an archaic global financial system that had already failed. It had failed workers it had failed the environment it had failed indigenous people and it had actually failed the global economy. It had collapsed. So that model was recognised as being not particularly ambitious if not harmful and detrimental to our communities. So we had the Trade for All agenda. We had endless inquiry and we had these experts in good faith engage with us and they told us what we needed.Now we have this UK free-trade agreement. Since then we've also had the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership we've had the EU trade agreement and all of these agreements have come with the enlightened recommendations of the Trade for All agenda. So it is with great disappointment and sorrow that I note that this agreement does not meet the requirements of the Trade for All agenda. It was not brought to us as a committee in a democratic way with the ability to change to engage or to recommend anything to do with the outcome of this agreement as was recommended. The submitters had no opportunity to engage with the mandate of trade negotiators or the content of what was on the table before we were able to hear their submissions.Most importantly when we look at what has been celebrated by the Minister as the "Treaty of Waitangi clause" Māori leaders in trade sat outside of that negotiation didn't know the content of either the mandate or the draft agreement and they told us that at select committee. I don't think I'll ever forget that day that the late great Moana Jackson was due to tell us all about that and we have the damning submission in writing but we never got to see him because he passed away in the night.So we have a responsibility to say that what a sustainable fair inclusive trade agreement looks like is not this. Why else would the Government have responded to the criticism that came after the agreement to the CPTPP to have the Trade for All agenda drawn up if we weren't going to abide by it if we weren't going to include workers' rights—and we heard that from the unions who came and submitted—if we weren't going to include Māori interests in the actual negotiation of this trade agreement? Why would we do that?But there are good things about this trade agreement. It does have more on the environment than we've ever had before though it remains to be seen whether the environmental chapter is in fact enforceable because we've never had an environmental chapter that was enforceable. We keep talking about having environmental clauses in trade agreements but we don't actually make them enforceable. As a lawyer I have to say that that's all that really matters. The investor chapters are expressed in great detail. The rights and privileges of investors foreign investors are enunciated in legally enforceable terms here. The environmental chapter remains to be litigated. We don't know. It does have more detail than we've ever seen before but it's still pretty broad.Workers' rights—again the unions are the experts on that and they don't find those adequate. The Waitangi Tribunal has found the standard-form inclusion of the Waitangi clause in here that's being celebrated by the Minister to fall short of what's needed. Again we didn't have Māori engagement in the negotiation itself.We do have a women's trade chapter here. That's great. Recognition that there are marginalised communities that may be excluded from international trade and that the benefits of international trade may not always "trickle down"—so to speak—to all communities is great. It's a starting point. Again to recognise the need for women's inclusion in trade is not to say that those chapters are enforceable that they include detail that is legally binding but it is included and it is an aspirational statement that you know we do need.With the breaches that I've just noted in indigenous rights and in Te Tiriti o Waitangi issues and in particular in workers' rights and in terms of knowing whether or not the environmental chapter can be enforced against international traders it is a disappointing agreement. In particular in light of the fact that we have the recommendations of the Trade for All agenda in front of us that we waited for them that we engaged with them that we had our communities put their hearts and souls into ensuring that those recommendations were fit for purpose for a future in trade that actually does benefit our nation and not just an elite few global multinationals. So that is disappointing and for that reason the Green Party will not be commending this bill to the House."