Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise in response to my esteemed former colleague from the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee the Hon Mark Mitchell. I rise not to change our position but to maintain the Green Party's principled position in opposition to this trade deal. I begin by noting that NGOs all over the Pacific—and in particular the Pacific Network on Globalisation who commissioned an independent impact analysis of this trade deal—have called this the Pacific's Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA).Hon David Parker: Not all NGOs.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: So they are standing opposed—not all NGOs that is true but at least in terms of the Pacific Network on Globalisation and their impact assessment that they commissioned independently and it was put together by Australian New Zealand and Pacific academics who are experts in trade.They raised the same kinds of concerns that New Zealanders raised over and over again about the TPPA which were the lack of transparency in its negotiations the lack of transparency in the text the lack of safeguards for human rights for environmental protections the erosion of democracy and the threat of deregulation privatisation—all of the same types of dangers that came with what we now know is an archaic economic model that led to every global economic disaster but particularly the last one which we can all remember. We hopefully would have thought we would have learnt some of those lessons: trade should in fact be for the good of the people and our environment rather than to benefit very few elite corporations at the very top. We know that that money is not going to trickle down. We know that their interests are not in protecting the greater good and in fact we know that this trade agreement—and we can see in its text—does aim to deregulate and it does leave our Pacific neighbours very much vulnerable to things like privatisation of their core State services which is something that the Greens do maintain a principled opposition to as did a vast number of New Zealanders when the TPPA was brought up on to our shores and we know what happened there.So this is a trade deal that's been 16 years in the making. It was signed in 2017 and the Green Party opposed it then. This bill is aiming to bring that into effect and in particular to impose the preferential tariffs. The small benefit that we get in our markets while we take away that incredibly important source of income to Governments who are already in most cases struggling to provide healthcare and education and other services to their people—while we get that small benefit and while we get an opening up of their markets and whatever benefit comes from deregulating them they get really no new access to ours at all. In fact our protectionist mechanisms—Australia's and New Zealand's being the big powerful trading partners here—are maintained. Our fruit and vegetable markets aren't being opened up in the same way that we are opening up their markets.So we get that and the benefit is 20 percent of our aid budget moving into trade. Already allocated money that was going to expertly delivered humanitarian and development aid programmes for promoting gender equity programmes promoting environmental sustainability rule of law programmes—that money was already there going to expertly deliver those types of benefits. Now that's going to be moving into trade—with some lip service paid to those values of course—but trade doesn't deliver those things not like actual development programmes do or not like actual humanitarian aid would.That's what we heard from the submitters that came actually specifically to talk about women's issues. They said that most women in the Pacific are not in a position to be trading internationally. They're not big international traders and so the money being taken away from gender equity programmes taken out of the local market was actually going to hurt women's empowerment in the Pacific. That was what the submission said. So they were not at all confident that a mention of how trade is supposed to now have some benefits for women's empowerment was actually going to uphold that given that this is an international trade agreement and that only elite urban traders are going to benefit. That's not the majority of the Pacific and it's certainly not women.This trade-for-aid model is spreading in the Pacific. The UK will be imposing it. We've already criticised China for being there; they engage in it. The EU is coming in to do the same. Why are we contributing? As a good neighbour as a leader in this region why are we contributing to this old-world economic order creeping into the Pacific—the most unique and beautiful island nations that are also some of the most vulnerable in the world? That encapsulates the Green Party's opposition to this deal.We need progressive trade. We've already had that promise from the Government and we know that we are going to deliver that in future for New Zealanders. We hope that nothing like the damaging the undemocratic trade that will come to us through the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will ever be incorporated into New Zealand law and our trade model again but why are we imposing it on the Pacific where we have the power to actually change that paradigm?The Green Party doesn't support this trade deal. We never have and we don't support the bill. We support progress. We support trade. New Zealand is itself a small island nation in many ways and we need trade but we need it to serve the good of our people of the environment and we need it most of all to not undermine democracy. It is in the good of the people and our environment to regulate trade. Unfettered growth on a finite planet is not sustainable and for that reason I don't commend this bill to the House.