Mitchell Mark: Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Mark: Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 24 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:7078. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney): Ten days is all it took. I am very happy to take a call on the Tariff (Free Trade Agreement between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea) Amendment Bill. I do want to acknowledge our Minister of Trade the Hon Tim Groser and the negotiating team that negotiated this free-trade agreement. I know that it may be a term that is used too often but we do punch above our weight and we have got a very proud history in New Zealand of being able to negotiate very very good terms in our free-trade agreements. More often than not we have to negotiate and deal with nations that are much bigger than us with much bigger economies and much bigger populations. That does not always provide the easiest of platforms from which to negotiate and operate and yet our Minister of Trade and our negotiators continue to negotiate very very good terms in our free-trade agreements.The Minister made a couple of points that I would like to discuss. Having been a Kiwi growing my business overseas for a decade it became apparent to me very quickly that as a small trading nation down at the bottom of the world there are challenges that we face that the rest of the global economy does not face. Something that we have to be focused on and take seriously as a Government is making sure that we continue to negotiate these types of free-trade agreements that we continue to leverage organisations like New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and that we are able to have a very good programme through our Business Growth Agenda which was initiated by the Hon Steven Joyce and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment to ensure that this Government does all that it can to enable the private sector and our business sector to compete with the rest of the world.We are a small country down at the bottom of the world with a relatively small population and if we want to continue to have a First World world-class health system and education system and to be able to invest in our infrastructure it is very important that we are able to continue to trade and grow our trading base globally and offshore. I want to acknowledge the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee which received this bill and I want to acknowledge Phil Goff and David Shearer who are always excellent to work with on the committee especially when it comes to these free-trade agreements.The comment that the Hon Phil Goff made about them being free-traders is very very true and I accept that. But the comment that he made about the entire Labour Party being free-traders I cannot agree with. I look at people like David Shearer Phil Goff and Clayton Cosgrove who are free-traders but we have seen in this House recently open dissension and challenges coming from the likes of Clare Curran against Clayton Cosgrove when it comes to free trade. I get the strong feeling that guys like Phil Goff David Shearer and Clayton Cosgrove are often having to battle within their own caucus against people who are actually not in favour of free trade.With regard to the Korean free-trade agreement itself I just wanted to quickly go over some of the numbers and what they actually mean for New Zealand and to finish off with just a couple of stakeholder comments around some of the submissions that we heard at the select committee. Some of the numbers—and I know that the House has probably already heard them in previous debates—include the fact that we are going to save $65 million worth of duties for New Zealand exporters and that is in just the first year alone. That is a significant gain right from the get-go. New Zealand has $229 million a year currently paid by our exporters in duty so it is a significant free-trade agreement.The other thing that it does for us—as Australia for example already has a free-trade agreement with Korea—is allow us to get back on to a level playing field in terms of the trade that we are able to engage in with Korea. Korea has 50 million people so it is a significant market. It is a big market that will continue to grow. Another interesting statistic that the Minister raised—I was not aware of this but it is a really interesting statistic—was that in countries that we do not have free-trade agreements with and that we have historically traded with trade appears to be going backwards and is in decline whereas in terms of the countries that we have signed free-trade agreements with we have grown our exports by over 10 percent. That is actually pretty significant for a country like ours. We have got $220 million worth of dairy products being exported to Korea—that was right through to the year ended June 2014—and New Zealand exporters are paying $89 million a year in duties. So again the reduction in tariffs on our dairy is going to be significant.Just very quickly I will sum up by saying that we talk about diversification in our economy outside the dairy sector and there has been a fair bit of public debate about that in the last couple of months. I have just got a comment here from the chief executive of Zespri Lain Jager who made a submission to the committee: “It is hugely satisfying that the industry can focus on building sales in the South Korean market which will benefit both New Zealand and South Korean growers as well as South Korean consumers. With volumes of our new SunGold variety increasing to over 50 million trays by 2018 this gives us a strong platform to build sales in this market.” I will finish on that note. Thank you.