Clark David: Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:11061. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): This National Government has destroyed a bipartisan approach to trade that has existed for decades. It has destroyed a convention that saw the leading parties in Parliament work together in the long-term interests of this country and it has done that through its wilfully arrogant approach to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. This Labour Government over here is a Government—sorry this Labour Party over here not yet a Government is a party that supports free trade. We always have. The first Labour Government pushed for increased access for trade in Europe. But we wish to protest in the strongest possible terms the current Government’s failure to effectively represent the long-term interests of New Zealand in the TPP negotiations. As it stands we cannot support the ratification of the TPP agreement.The legislation before us is an attempt to codify in the law an agreement that through a wilfully arrogant approach has failed to represent New Zealand’s long-term interests as well as it could have. As a result our sovereignty is being unnecessarily curtailed for an agreement with dubious benefits. It is consistent with a National Government that has lost its way. It is increasingly arrogant and out of touch. It is ignoring the big issues facing everyday New Zealanders: the housing crisis health cuts jobs wages and rising education costs. It is too focused on those at the top—the mega-rich—and it is not looking out for middle New Zealand. Well a Labour Government will look out for those in middle New Zealand. We would restore the Kiwi Dream.The Government’s chief negotiator could not give any confirmation that it had sought to preserve the right of future Governments to legislate for a ban on non-resident foreign speculators in New Zealand’s housing market and then in this House the Minister stood up and said that the Government never asked for one. It did not ask for a ban on non-resident foreign speculators. The Minister confirmed it in the House in February. It was so arrogant that it abandoned the previous approach to trade that has served this country for decades. That is the nature of this Government. It abandoned the consensus model that has worked for decades and as a consequence we have got a worse deal. We have not got the best deal that New Zealanders could have got to consider in this Parliament.Other countries preserved the right of their sovereign Governments to legislate in the national interest. Let us not forget when we look at the annexes in the TPP agreement that Singapore Viet Nam and Australia to name three countries sought wider powers to legislate that could would and should if they wanted to include a ban on non-resident foreign speculators in their housing market. Our country did not get that. But worse it did not even ask for that right despite it being the policy of one of the major parties in this Parliament for a couple of years. It was introduced by David Shearer. It was confirmed by Andrew Little as a clear policy that we in future wanted to introduce a ban on non-resident foreign speculators in the New Zealand residential housing market because they are distorting our economy. But the Government is not interested in that. It is interested in protecting the interests of the wealthy few. At least it is consistent.But it is a great shame because the agreement that has been put before this House for consideration the legislation that it is based on which we are looking at today is not as good as it could be. It is not in New Zealanders’ interests in the way that it might have been had the approach been taken that previous Governments have taken where they included unions businesses and academics in the shaping of the negotiating documents. I have learnt that other countries in the TPP process have included those bodies in the development of their negotiating documents in a way that this Government did not do.The Government thought it was above consulting with New Zealand businesses. I have heard from businesses in New Zealand that are not happy with the way that this process has been conducted. The Government thought it was above consulting with unions on the development of this deal because it thought it knew better. The Government thought it was above consulting with academics on putting this trade deal together in New Zealand’s interests because it is arrogant. It is increasingly out of touch with middle New Zealand and it is increasingly saying that it is above the interests of specialists in this country too. And of course all of this leads to a situation where the Government has not even asked for the things that would help New Zealand’s future economy to shift away from the speculative sector and towards the productive sector which we know will be in our long-term economic interests. It is essentially the mark of a Government that seems prepared to manage decline in our economy. It used to speak of aspiration; it does not any more. Now it is just about being a part of the club.The Labour Party believes that the ability to act in the interests of New Zealand residents and citizens is a principle that builds faith in participative democracy. Unnecessary weakening of sovereign State powers achieves the opposite. We are opposed in principle to this deal.We also want to register our protest at the shameful curtailing of the processes that led up to this point. In the select committee process that I participated in we had a 6000-page document negotiated over 5 years with corporates in the room. We were given a matter of weeks for submitters across New Zealand to work through it come to their views and share what might be in New Zealand’s wider interests because they had not been a part of that wider consultation period that previously existed. So these people expected New Zealanders to come to terms and give good advice in that very short period of time. Of course they did their best.Then the Government changed the process again so that the parliamentarians receiving the submissions did not have the time previously allocated to work through them to make sure that we could make the best recommendations back to this Parliament. That is the arrogance. That is the increasingly out-of-touch nature of this Government. It knows better. It knows better than the experts in New Zealand. It knows better than the businesses. It knows better than the unions. It knows better than the academics. It is determined to ram this process through before Christmas because it does not want to be dealing with this in election year. It knows that the transparency of sunlight—the wider examination—is not going to be popular with the public when they see what this Government has traded off in order to get a deal done to be a part of the club.We have already seen some warnings too in the material that has come through from Treasury. We have not seen it all. The regulatory impact statements were revealed just a couple of days ago out from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—very late in the piece. We have scanned through them of course quickly. We have seen little titbits of advice from Treasury—of course not publicly released. There is more secrecy than needs to be in this process and it continues. But Treasury says: “the timeframes for decisions have not allowed for a full assessment of the potential impacts or risks involved in some of the proposals. Further work is needed with stakeholders to ensure the proposals are workable and any unintended consequences are mitigated if Ministers wish to reduce the risk of substantive amendments being required as a result of information emerging at the select committee stage.”Of course when all of that happens those decisions will be made on the fly too. This is not the way to make good legislation in the national interest. It has not been the whole way through. It is the sign of a Government that is increasingly arrogant and out of touch and interested only in being a part of the club. It is not working in the interests of middle New Zealand and it is not working in the interests of future sovereign Governments by regulating in the national interest.We saw also in the previous examination processes that the modelling was flawed. Submitters pointed out that one of the calculations involved in the modelling for the national interest analysis was out by a factor of 300. I have never seen such a thing in economic modelling in all my time and yet we are supposed to rely on that as an indication that this deal is good for New Zealand. On top of this the Government has not supplied proper thorough analysis on the employment outcomes the income distribution outcomes. What analysis is available comes from overseas and suggests up to 6000 job losses as a result of this agreement by 2025 and a drop in the proportion of income that goes to wages as opposed to capital over time. That should concern all New Zealanders.Tim Groser said he would pull out of the deal if there was nothing for dairy. Well there is $90 million by 2030 for dairy in terms of increased output. Traditional modelling would say that all of that value would accrue to consumers overseas so we have no value to New Zealand in that—perhaps nine jobs. That is the output of three large dairy farms—perhaps nine jobs by 2030. If that is what Mr Groser thinks is the big deal for dairy then we have really seen how far ambition has fallen under this Government.We know that the modelling is very rough. We have had it pointed out to us that gains on a very optimistic model as a result of the tariff barrier reductions would amount to 0.05 percent of GDP by 2030. Normal growth without this agreement in the New Zealand economy on historical averages over that time would be 47 percent—47 percent without the TPP and 0.05 percent with—