Clark David: Trade (Safeguard Measures) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Trade (Safeguard Measures) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16543. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North):I was rather hoping the Minister in the chair the Minister of Commerce would beat me to my feet to answer the questions put to him by Phil Goff around the commencement date—David Shearer: He’s not that quick.Dr DAVID CLARK: My colleagues are making sport with that statement but it was a very real hope. Really it has to do with the date of Royal assent because the point that was very well articulated by Phil Goff was that when this bill the Trade (Safeguard Measures) Bill has been around for 6 years and purports to deal with an issue—products being subsidised or dumped on the New Zealand market—we need some examples of when this has happened or where it has happened or what industries are under threat currently.Why is it that the Government has introduced this legislation now at this point in time again to the Committee? It has been in abeyance I think for a year since it was last here since Andrew Williams last had the opportunity to speak on it. I heard his concern that this is a different time and the issues need to be raised again and rightly so. The Minister has the opportunity to inform the Committee which industries are under threat and when safeguards were last used as a method of dealing with subsidised or dumped goods. The safeguards are an emergency measure that is applied at the New Zealand border. It is not something that is used from day to day as I understand it but the Minister ought to be able to tell us in that instance—because it will not be an often occurring thing—just which industries are under threat.The pair of shoes that I commonly wear is manufactured locally in Dunedin and is from a small company and I would hate to think that it was being undermined by dumping. It is the last one in New Zealand. McKinlays Footwear is the last company making shoes in a factory on a reasonable scale in New Zealand. It makes a high-quality product. It is not going to be undermined if there are hundreds of faux Italian shoes on the market; it is going to be undermined by a particular type of dumping. Is it under threat? Is it under threat?Non-primary manufactured goods went down 6.5 percent in real terms last year in the 2013 year—David Shearer: What?Dr DAVID CLARK: They went down 6.5 percent in real terms—non-primary manufactured goods.David Shearer: That’s a collapse.Dr DAVID CLARK: That is a collapse. The Minister keeps trying to say there is no crisis in manufacturing. We are not wanting to overstate it but there is a very real issue in terms of the balance of New Zealand’s trade that has not been addressed by this Government. It has not managed to find that balance to get New Zealand into the right space and still we are running up debt. I mean this Government has had 5 years where it has not run a surplus. Labour ran a surplus for 9 out of 9 years. This Government does have a problem balancing the books and it has not found a way of doing that.Presumably these safeguard measures are designed to ensure that small and medium sized enterprises that are manufacturing and exporting—for example like the shoe company I raised—ought to be protected in some way. These rules are designed to bring us into compliance with the World Trade Organization rules that allow the kind of fair trading across borders that protects us against malicious kinds of behaviour designed to undermine competitiveness through one-off dumping manoeuvres.So we support this bill but we are concerned about just what is being protected why and when and whether in fact the Government has any urgency on this at all or whether we are going to see this bill further postponed and pushed out potentially to after the election because the Minister has not given us that comfort around what the urgency is now 6 years on. The bill originally was introduced by the Hon Lianne Dalziel who is now the Mayor of Christchurch during the last Government—Carol Beaumont: A fine woman.Dr DAVID CLARK: A fine woman as my colleague Carol Beaumont says—