Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Thank you Madam Speaker. I want to make a few comments about why this bill that we're debating tonight is so important but also to start by acknowledging the leadership of successive Ministers David Parker Damien O'Connor and now Todd McClay and the fantastic team of trade officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade led by Vangelis Vitalis.At one level—at a very simple level—it's obvious that this trade agreement is good for New Zealand. The fact that there will be as the Minister said in his opening remarks $100 million in tariff savings from day one—that's worth something. That's worth something to our fantastic onion-growing industry who make a fantastic crop that they successfully sell into a number of international markets and they will benefit significantly from that reduction in tariffs.But on another level this agreement is a very important milestone in the progression of New Zealand's foreign policy of which trade is incredibly important. In the years after the Battle of Seattle in 1999 I was living in Washington DC working for a group of international NGOs and one of the campaigns that I worked on was a global campaign of hundreds of NGOs and social movements to make trade fair. It was a global movement of people who felt that the juggernaut of neoliberalism—imposed in many cases through trade agreements—was incredibly unfair to people in developing countries; that the rich countries of the world were yet again rorting trade rules in their own interests; that farmers in developing countries and in places like New Zealand were hard done by North American and European protectionism; that intellectual property rules were locking up massive amounts of economic value to the people who developed their economies first; and that trade agreements were shutting down the policy space preventing developing countries around the world from using the same economic policies and tools that every single wealthy and advanced country today used in order to spur its economic development in the earlier phases. The protests of those years—which went right through to the explosion of unrest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership—demonstrated that trade agreements had stretched to breaking point in public support for and consent for those trade agreements.Twenty years after I was organising those demonstrations I found myself as Minister for Trade and Export Growth in our Government here in 2020 welcoming a multi-party delegation of European members of Parliament who said that this EU - New Zealand trade agreement is gold standard. They said it was the best agreement that the EU had ever done and they didn't know of another trade agreement anywhere in the world that had achieved the kind of advances that this agreement did.Here's the problem. You can believe that trade agreements do stretch public consent for free trade to breaking point by doing those things that I mentioned. You can also believe and understand that this country is a trading nation—we would not exist we couldn't survive in the modern world without open access to international markets. We cannot do otherwise. So that contradiction is one of the great challenges of our foreign policy. We have to find a way to navigate those two things: to pursue the material and economic interests of New Zealand and our great export industries while also doing the things that New Zealand needs. We need a Pharmac that can operate properly. We cannot cope with onerous intellectual property rules that the great towering heights of international capital demand today. We need the policy space in this country to regulate in the public interest. So this is no mean political problem to be fixed.I want to recognise the efforts of the Ministers who led this agreement because it's such an important milestone in navigating between those sharply competing interests and finish by noting that this agreement has labour standards—it allows the EU and New Zealand to hold each other to account on our climate commitments on animal welfare on gender commitments through the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. There is a lot to celebrate in this agreement.