Bishop Chris: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBishop Chris: General Debate[Sitting date: 11 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7908. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS BISHOP (National): What a depressing weekend in Palmerston North it must have been for those members opposite. We just heard from Adrian that Palmerston North is a sea of red. Well I have to say that it might be a Labour city now but it is a Labour city surrounded by a sea of blue. Let me just say to members opposite that Iain Lees-Galloway’s words will come back to haunt him—they will come back to haunt him. He said that the National Party will never ever win Palmerston North. Well I have a message for Iain Lees-Galloway: Jono Naylor is coming for you. I am coming for Trevor Mallard in Hutt South—[Interruption] Nuk is coming for you in Port Hills Ruth Dyson. We are all fighting hard for those seats so those words are going to come back to haunt the Labour Party. Iain Lees-Galloway’s numbers are about as shonky as Grant Robertson’s. The size of the Labour conference in Palmerston North on the weekend was about the size of a National Party regional conference—and it was Labour’s national conference.No more talk about members who are irrelevant. I want to talk in my brief contribution about the big divide in New Zealand politics. Actually the big divide in New Zealand politics these days is not between conservatism or liberalism. It is not about the rural and urban divide. It is not even about left or right these days. The real divide in this Parliament is between what New Zealand’s attitude should be to the outside world. The question is this: does New Zealand’s future lie as an open confident trading nation connected to the global economy knowing that welcoming foreign capital and labour drives increased prosperity and lifts our living standards or does New Zealand’s future lie instead in lifting our shutters to the outside world denying even the reality or the benefits of globalisation and practising a form of protectionism that manifests itself at best as economic vandalism and at worst as a form of bigotry and even racism?As my colleague Todd Muller pointed out for 30 years there has been a bipartisan consensus in this House about the reality of the outside world and about the dismantling of Fortress New Zealand and it is one of the Labour Party’s greatest legacies to New Zealand that it started that process from 1984 onwards. Labour dismantled protectionism. It got rid of tariffs. It got rid of subsidies on agricultural products. It opened New Zealand to the outside world. Well how times have changed. It started back in 2008 with the outrageous decision by Labour to change the investment rules on a whim to stop the Canadian pension plan from investing in Auckland Airport. It continued when Labour was in Opposition and turned its sights on foreign investment and farmland under Phil Goff’s leadership forgetting that foreign farm sales under Labour were four times what they were under National and forgetting the enormous benefits that foreign investment brings to New Zealand.The nadir of this attack on foreign investment and on foreign migrants was Phil Twyford’s utterly disgraceful and disreputable attack a few months ago on people of Chinese ethnicity. It was the absolute nadir. This was from the party that in 2002 apologised to Chinese New Zealanders for the poll tax back in the 1860s. Well what a disgrace. It is no surprise that the Labour Party has stopped talking about this recently. In some ways it is inevitable that the Labour Party would do this—that it would capitulate to its own worst instincts. It is under attack from the Green Party which has never supported free trade and has never supported an open New Zealand despite the fact that it likes to come down here and preach about internationalism and those sorts of things. It has never supported actual openness with the outside world. The Labour Party has been under attack on its left flank so it is no surprise that it would capitulate but it is very disgraceful.The modern-day Labour Party is I believe no more than the political wing of the organised protest movement—the type of people who think an argument is just saying “Neo-liberalism neo-liberalism” over again; the type of people who think that you start an argument by talking about Crosby/Textor; the type of people who opposed the Chinese free-trade deal and who opposed the agricultural subsidies and tariff removal of the 1980s; the type of people who no doubt opposed Closer Economic Relations in 1983; and the type of people who do not want us to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal which is the apex of trade and diplomacy in New Zealand foreign policy for 30 years.This is the important point and this is the critical question that confronts the Labour Party in this Parliament today: which way is the Labour Party going to go on the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Is it going to back openness; is it going to back globalisation; is going to back connecting New Zealand into the global economy; or is it going to give in to its worst instincts continue to be a non-responsible party of Government and back the protest movement and people who have never had New Zealand’s best interests? It is absolutely fundamentally in our best interests that the Labour Party signs the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is a critical question for this Parliament and for this country as to whether or not the Labour Party goes for New Zealand or it goes for protest.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.