Norman Russel: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: General Debate[Sitting date: 12 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5719. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. Three years ago I had the benefit I guess of being able to spend a day in the Fukushima exclusion zone which is the 25-kilometre radius zone round the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Within that zone created in Japan nobody was allowed to live because of the radiation and contamination from the explosion at Fukushima. Going around that zone was extraordinary because Japan is so crowded but there was nobody there at the abandoned rice paddies the abandoned villages and so forth. You got a real sense of the genuine dangers of nuclear power in that context. The German Government took note of the Fukushima disaster and made the decision that it would phase out nuclear power which is its democratic right.A decision to phase out nuclear powerover time passed through the Bundestag the German Parliament. This it seems to me coming from nuclear-free New Zealand is a perfectly reasonable position for a democratic Parliament to take. The problem was that Germany had signed an investment treaty with Sweden that had an investor-State dispute settlement clause within it. So a Swedish nuclear power station operator decided that it would take a case against Germany for about $7 billion—an investor-State dispute settlement case. It was suing the German Government because the German Government had the temerity to democratically decide that it wanted to phase out nuclear power.This is a classic problem with investor-State dispute settlement clauses: they give investors special rights to sue Governments in secret tribunals for very large compensation. The biggest case that we know of is US$1.3 billion which was awarded against Ecuador. The reason why Vattenfall the power company was so confident in its case—this case is ongoing against the German Government—was that Vattenfall had previously taken on the German Government over a coal-fired power plant. Hamburg where the plant was to be built had put a whole bunch of environmental protections on the plant. It put a whole bunch of environmental rules around the new coal plant which were designed to protect the River Elbe. Vattenfall the Swedish power company did not like these environmental rules so it sued the German Federal Government under investor-State dispute settlement clauses for a little over €1 billion. The German Government settled out of court. You might say: “Oh well that proves that Vattenfall did not win.” Well in fact it did win because the settlement out of court was that Hamburg had to remove all of the environmental constraints. That is a classic example of how investor-State dispute settlement clauses undermine the ability of Governments to regulate to protect the environment. This is just one case amongst hundreds. These cases are now multiplying. There are more cases than ever every year over investor-State dispute settlement clauses.The problem with these investor-State dispute settlement clauses is that there is no international court that you can go to. You go to a three-person panel a tribunal—one person is appointed by the company one is appointed by the Government and one agreed in the middle. The decisions of these tribunals are binding. There is no appeal. The proceedings happen in secret literally in secret. Often people do not know until some time afterwards what the decision was—how much the costs were that were awarded. So the impact of these is a chilling effect on regulation—the regulation by Governments in order to protect human health and the environment. This is why the European Union Trade Commissioner has now come out and said that these clauses are no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century and they will not sign up to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which is the equivalent agreement to the Trans-Pacific Partnership if you like between Europe and the United States. The obstacle to signing that at the moment is the investor-State dispute settlement clauses because the Europeans are saying: “We will not sign up to these clauses which prevent our Government from regulating to protect the environment or human health or anything else.” Let us remember that Egypt was sued because it raised the minimum wage in one of these cases.These clauses are a fundamental constraint on democratic regulation and that is why they are so problematic in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The clause that Tim Groser is so keen to sign up to in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is exactly the clause that the EU commissioner described as no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. That is the clause that the EU refuses to sign and Tim Groser is rushing in to sign it. What is it all for? Well according to the US Department of Agriculture if New Zealand gets everything it wants in the Trans-Pacific Partnership all the agricultural tariffs are removed all the agricultural trade-related quotas are removed and New Zealand’s GDP will increase by 0.01 percent in 2025. And for that we are willing to trade our right to pass democratic law to protect the environment and human health. That is a bad deal.