Auchinvole Chris: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill — In Committee 
Auchinvole Chris: New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17351] 
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National) 
: 
 My colleague Wayne Mapp said yesterday: “Traders are waiting for us to do our legislative work so they can get ahead and reap the gains of the agreement.” That is very very true and it is with pleasure that I rise to speak on Part 1 of the New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement Bill. Part 1 is the mechanism that reduces the barriers while at the same time providing safeguards. 
The barriers to trade are very very real when one does not have free trade. I reflect on what the previous speaker said: free trade is fair trade. Exporters do not have an easy task but it is an honourable one and it is one that like it or not the rest of us live by. So what will be the effect of this free-trade agreement? The tariffs on 96 percent of New Zealand’s current exports to China will be eliminated by 2019. Two-thirds of all of New Zealand’s goods will be tariff free within 5 years. What a wonderful opportunity has been created and I would like to add my compliments to the officials to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and to everybody who has been working tremendously hard to achieve it. 
There are many ways of penetrating a market. There are probably as many ways of penetrating a market as there are exporters involved in the trade. I reflect back on a career in the Dairy Board. With the difficulties associated with quotas with the endless conflict and with the challenges for access it was amazing that we had the trade we did have—and what an effort it took! 
The task of the free-trade agreement is to reduce and eradicate the unnecessary blockages. So how do those blockages occur and why do we have to have the transitional aspects that occur in Part 1? The blockages generally occur through apprehension on the part of manufacturers and local producers. If we look at the Common Agricultural Policy—which was a huge blockage to progress and everybody acknowledged it was not sensible—we see they occur from fears of privation from fears of starvation from the experience of war and from the experience of countries being unable to feed their people. We go right back to the basic law of the provision of food shelter and clothing being a Government’s first responsibility to its people. So food has always been an incredibly sensitive delicate issue and tariffs were a way of giving protection. They have been used clumsily though. 
When I think back to trading in the Pacific I know that the Pacific offers New Zealand exporters tremendous trading opportunity. We have markets that are operated under French— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Marian Hobbs) 
: China? 
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE 
: Well indeed. But as a precursor to dealing with China if one looks to see how trade is conducted within one’s own local theatre one sees that there are many different ways. I can remember doing a chart of tariffs against particular dairy products—this I am sure will interest my colleague Doug Woolerton. The dairy product tariffs in say Tahiti used to run for line after line after line. They had been built up over an awfully long time which meant that they were hard to reduce and hard to remove. 
So we get to China—was it Napoleon who called it the sleeping dragon—and we look at its tariffs. We see China built a wall around itself—not just a wall of stone but a wall of tariffs. Then New Zealand through its negotiation and its approaches started to penetrate that tariff wall which is where we have come to today. 
New Zealand has enjoyed free trade for a very long time. Having the benefit of grey hair and a bit of experience in life I can go back—and I am sure Madam Chair will remember this—to the pre - free-trade times. The domestic life of New Zealand in the 1960s when we were afflicted with tariffs was one where we had very little choice of goods—very little choice of goods at all. In the 1970s people had plenty of money but there was a shortage of goods. There were import restrictions tariffs export restrictions and all sorts of problems. Nowadays the logistics of exporting and importing are able to concentrate on the real elements of trading rather than the artificial ones.