Locke Keith: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill — In Committee 
Locke Keith: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17375] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Tim Groser quite a bit earlier on was particularly worried about using this trade agreement in some way to advance human rights concerns—that is in relation to the Green position that it is very bad timing to be signing an agreement a couple of weeks out from the Olympic Games when there is such a huge campaign to try to use this period to improve the human rights of Chinese people by supporting those millions of Chinese who are struggling against the one-party State that rules over them for greater human rights. 
The arguments used by Tim Groser were in contradiction to our foreign policy. One of his arguments was that there are human rights violations everywhere and that if we used trade to advance human rights concerns we would have to use it against all of those countries. We are selective in our foreign policy as to how we use whatever instrument a carrot or a stick to achieve a gain for human rights. In South Africa we used sanctions; in other countries we have used other ways. There is anything from sanctions to rewards. The Green position is not to put any additional sanctions on China. We support trade agreements with China. We support trade with China. What we are against is giving a preferential agreement—free entry of Chinese goods into our country—and signing this agreement right at this time which is the very wrong time to do it. We can have the arguments about the goodness of the agreement as a whole but the timing is completely wrong. The idea that we do not use instruments or rewards in foreign policy to achieve human rights gains is totally wrong. 
There is the idea that economic development and the development of an educated middle class etc. is commonly accompanied by an improvement in human rights and that has happened to some degree in China today. There have been some advances but that does not always happen and it does not always happen if the world tolerates dictatorship. We saw it in Germany which was the most advanced industrial country. That did not mean to say that it was advanced in human rights during the Hitler period. We see it today in the most advanced economy the United States where there has been a huge deterioration of human rights—for example Guantánamo Bay the complete abuse of proper trial procedures high rates of execution etc which have been a very bad model for human rights in the world and that is in the most developed economy. So there is more to it than just saying that industrial development will be good. 
I think that the idea that trade is the answer to everything is wrong too. Sure New Zealand has advanced through being a major trading nation but it is not necessarily the best way forward to say that we will replace our manufacturing economy and we will let Chinese competition through low wages smash that and that we will compensate by increased agricultural exports. That would end up with an economy that is not balanced and that is more at the whim of the international economy and international markets etc. That is not the future. 
The ideology that trade is everything and the proportion of trade to GDP is everything is not the way forward for New Zealand particularly as we approach peak oil. The costs of trade in some respects will increase and countries are looking to greater food sovereignty and such things and rightly so given the way the international market in food has led to huge problems in many countries. There are huge increases in price because the free-trading environment is often substituted for local food production and that has led to much higher costs and devastation for millions of people worldwide. We see that in the big demonstrations and riots that are occurring in several countries. That is partly a result of the ideology that trade is everything and balanced economies are nothing. Thank you.