Rejecting The TPP Could Help Labour Win In 2017.

Deploying All Of His Persuasive Powers: Andrew Little faces an enormous challenge in persuading Middle New Zealand that the very limited gains of the  Trans-Pacific Partnership aren't worth the loss of control over their nation's economic future. The political winds are shifting. US Presidential contender, Hilary Clinton, has come out against the TPP, forced to change her position by the massive rejection, worldwide, of economies run not for people but for powerful business interests.

 

LABOUR’S STANCE on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could end up determining the outcome of the 2017 General Election. If Andrew Little aligns his party with the other parliamentary opponents of the TPP – the Greens and NZ First – then the legislation giving effect to the agreement will barely scrape through the House of Representatives. Such open and substantial parliamentary opposition will clear the way for Andrew Little to lead an anti-TPP coalition into electoral battle in 2017. If, however, Labour ends up supporting the TPP, then it will be a fractured and fractious Opposition that takes the field against John Key in two years’ time.

 

With Labour firmly opposed, the National-led Government’s best outcome would see the TPP’s enabling legislation passed by a margin of three votes. But if, as seems likely, the Maori Party acknowledges the rising anti-TPP sentiment within Maoridom, by either abstaining or voting against the bill, then the nearest thing to a TPP ratification process that New Zealanders are going to get will be carried by just one vote – Peter Dunne’s.

 

Nobody in the pro-TPP camp wants that to happen. A Parliament split down the middle (61:60) presents the public with a powerful symbol of discord, disagreement and dissent. A one-vote (or even a three vote) majority says: “This isn’t over. This matter will be decided at the ballot box.”

 

Such a prospect is a far cry from the cosy bipartisanship which, since the early 1980s, has characterised the free-trade debate in New Zealand. It was the Labour-leader, Bill Rowling, who, in 1982, over-ruled the doubters in his party and swung Labour’s support behind Rob Muldoon’s proposed Closer Economic Relationship Agreement (CER) with Australia. The subsequent 33 years of bipartisan unity on free trade has effectively marginalised all those individuals and groups cautious about eliminating border protections. Understandably, the restoration of bipartisanship is currently the pro-TPP camp’s No. 1 priority.

 

What the Right fears the most is two years of rising political temperatures and sharpened social antagonisms, during which the controversial content of the TPP supplies the Government’s opponents with all the ammunition they need to bring down the National-led coalition of right-wing political parties.

 

Over the next few weeks the New Zealand people should, therefore, be on the alert for two full-on political campaigns. The first will be a government-funded PR campaign designed to sell the alleged benefits of the TPP to as many Kiwis as possible. The second will involve dozens (if not scores) of journalists, businesspeople and academics doing their level best to persuade Labour to return to the bipartisan fold.

 

There will be those in Labour’s parliamentary caucus who will find it difficult not to echo the content of both campaigns. For the former trade minister, Phil Goff, in particular, it will be nearly impossible to take any other position. He is, after all, the man who negotiated the 2008 China/New Zealand Free Trade Agreement. Nor is he alone. The right-wing political commentator and PR maven, Matthew Hooton, has speculated that as many as half-a-dozen Labour MPs could end up crossing-the-floor to vote in favour of the TPP.

 

Labour should not, however, allow itself to be spooked by such scare tactics. The political winds are shifting, and the last thing Labour wants to be caught defending is the TPP. And that’s because the deal to which the Government has formally committed New Zealanders is not a trade deal in the way our FTA with the Chinese is a trade deal.

 

The Nobel Prize-winner for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz, has this to say about the TPP: “You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for ‘free trade’. The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies.”

 

If Labour truly believes it’s going to enhance its chances of winning the 2017 election by swinging-in behind the “country’s most powerful business lobbies”, then it’s in for an unpleasant surprise. Those shifting political winds that have caused US Presidential contender, Hilary Clinton, to come out against the TPP, are driven by the massive rejection, worldwide, of economies run not for people but for powerful businesses.

 

With Labour, the Greens and NZ First allied against the TPP (and around what other issue could these three parties credibly campaign as a government-in-waiting?) the National Party and its allies will find themselves campaigning for an agreement which, as more and more of its detailed provisions are analysed and explained, becomes less and less defensible.

 

The 2017 election, if Labour, the Greens and NZ First box clever, can thus become a contest between competing visions. The TPP’s vision of an economy that’s managed for powerful business interests; and the progressive Opposition’s vision of an economy that works for people.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 October 2015.

Selling The Bigger Picture: Tim Groser Brings Home The TPP.

Adding Perspective: New Zealand's Trade Minister, Tim Groser, interjects during the Atlanta media conference announcing the settlement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: “Look, long after the details of this negotiation on things like tons of butter have been regarded as a footnote in history, the bigger picture of what we’ve achieved today will be what remains.”

 

ON THE DAY the deal was done, Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, had this to say about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP):

 

“You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for ‘free trade’. The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which the negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about free trade.”

 

Certainly a genuine free trade agreement would have offered New Zealand much more than the TPP. Rather than trying to work up some enthusiasm for a deal that offers staggered tariff reductions over decades, a genuine free trade agreement would have had New Zealanders celebrating their farmers’ full and immediate access to the vast markets of the USA and Japan.

 

Tim Groser, New Zealand’s acerbic Trade Minister, would dismiss such expectations as wholly inappropriate to what he calls the world of power politics. At the media conference marking the negotiations’ successful conclusion, Mr Groser summed-up his view of the TPP with the following interjection:

 

“Look, long after the details of this negotiation on things like tons of butter have been regarded as a footnote in history, the bigger picture of what we’ve achieved today will be what remains.”

 

By which he meant, presumably, that the TPP represents much more than the sum of its thirty (still secret) chapters: that it is in and of itself a positive contribution to the welfare of the human species.

 

And yet, on the basis of what little information has so far been released about the TPP, this is a difficult argument to stand up. What, for example, is positive about the extension of copyright from 50 to 70 years? Or the ability of powerful pharmaceutical companies to extend the life of their patents for an additional three years? Far from freeing-up the commerce of the Pacific Rim, these measures will only restrict it further. Since when was free trade about increasing the monopoly power of huge corporations?

 

“Since forever!”, Noam Chomsky would, waspishly, reply. According to the dissident professor from MIT: “Globalisation [of which the TPP is a classic manifestation] is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.”

 

If this is, indeed, the “bigger picture” to which the efforts of our Trade Minister and his negotiating team have contributed, then the people of New Zealand could be in trouble.

 

Under the provisions of the TPP, the New Zealand tradition of coming up with creative collective solutions to specific social problems (ACC and Pharmac spring to mind) will no longer be permissible. Henceforth, “solutions” will be the exclusive purview of big (i.e. foreign) corporations. Massive financial compensation will be extracted from any government foolhardy enough to put itself between these corporate predators and their prey. Adjudicated by tribunals composed of three carefully vetted corporate lawyers, “Investor State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) referrals now constitute a clear and present danger to the sovereignty of all but the most powerful nation states.

 

In the words of Professor Andrew Geddis of the University of Otago, if New Zealand signs up to the TPP “we are going to change how our country is run into something else.”

 

That “something else” may turn out to be a big deal, says Professor Geddis, or it may not. But why put our constitution at risk in the first place? Do we really want to “find ourselves reasonably frequently hanging on the decision of three private individuals who are deciding if we are allowed to have a policy in place without having to pay many millions of dollars to an overseas company.”

 

Very little in the Trade Minister’s “bigger picture”, it seems, is “free”. Nor does “trade” constitute the TPP’s dominant theme. Rather, Mr Groser’s “achievement” is mostly about the application of constant and irresistible pressure to force open the markets of weaker economies to the investors of the stronger.

 

“Managed” trade, indeed – but not by us.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 October 2015.