Fletcher Tabuteau: International corporates big winners with TPP

Fletcher Tabuteau

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) continues to be ignored by the mainstream media and so I am grateful for these column inches.

This government has been negotiating a supposed trade agreement with some of the biggest economies in the world.

Your first instinct, I imagine, would be, "great". However, they have been negotiating in secret, despite precedent from around the world showing them how they could keep New Zealanders informed without compromising their negotiations.

The reason they want to keep this trade agreement secret is because New Zealand has nothing to offer the other member countries like Canada or the US.

Those countries could negotiate the lowering of some of their tariffs (rest assured, they will only be lowered, not removed, and they will take decades to make any significant downward moves) but New Zealand is a free market economy with no, or next to no, barriers in place.

So what is this government giving in return?

The TPP is less a trade agreement and more an agreement on how international corporates can take a bigger slice of the pie in every country around the world. So in return for slightly less restricted access to the US market, New Zealand will have to give up little bits of their sovereignty; that is, the right for the people of New Zealand to make decisions in the best interest of New Zealanders.

There is a very real fear that the benefits of Pharmac will be traded away. Medical practitioners, health academics and those practising in the New Zealand health industry are trying to make it clear to the National Party that we cannot afford to negotiate the health of New Zealanders away for the sake of corporate profits. That is not a trade New Zealanders are willing to make.

But New Zealand First also sends a warning to New Zealand businesses, like in the live sheep to Saudi case, international business will have the right to sue government under the TPP if they can prove loss of income/profits under unfair treatment.

Are we compensating New Zealand businesses that can no longer export live sheep for slaughter overseas? No, instead we are paying a bribe to a foreign corporate simply because we changed New Zealand law, because New Zealanders decided the freighting of live sheep was cruel. And so it stopped the practise, but be very clear New Zealand business; international corporates will be compensated for the "inconvenience" of having to comply with New Zealand law but you will not.

Who do you think the winners of this so called trade agreement will be in the long run? Certainly not NZ business.

-Fletcher Tabuteau is a Rotorua-based NZ First list MP.