Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Amendment Bill

Last time I spoke on this bill, it was only the day after the election in the United States, but before I get into this speech I would like to also acknowledge something that had not happened when I first started that speech, and that is to say that we are all thinking of the people of North Canterbury and Marlborough, and of what they are going through, and to offer my condolences in this opportunity to speak.

I have heard the words “resilience” and “stoicism” being thrown around the House and around in the media over the last couple of days. Although I think these are important attributes for any community to get through a disaster, such as the one that the people of Kaikōura and the surrounding districts are going through, I think it is also important for us to remember that there is a fragility as well for the population. These are difficult times and difficult things for them to get through. I would like to congratulate all the ordinary people of that area who are helping each other and who will need to continue to do so over the coming days and weeks and months ahead.

But what we have also seen since I started this speech was confirmation of what we all knew was coming over the weekend, and that is, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) legislation is not going to get through the United States political system in the lame-duck period. The last grasp, the last hope that people were holding on to that this may get through—this is not going to get through. And this is what makes us being here in this House, passing this legislation, even more inexplicable—the fact that we are here, that we are debating a piece of legislation that is not going to happen. Why is that? Why are we here doing this? It is because the full and proper analysis that was required has fallen victim to the Government’s unseemly haste to get unpopular legislation through ahead of election year.

This was always a time line that did not make sense. It was a time line that did not fit into what was happening around the world. Here we are, we are using parliamentary time to do this, and the question “What for?” has yet to be answered by any of the Government speakers who have taken a call in this third reading of this legislation. What are we here for? I am not asking some kind of existential question when I ask that; I am actually asking: what are we doing here? What is the purpose of this legislation? But even more fundamentally, what is the plan now?

For the months and months leading up to us being here, we have been continually told by Government members that the sky was going to fall in if this legislation and this agreement did not go ahead. Well, what is the economic plan now? We have always pointed to the fact that, actually, what was negotiated was not that great a deal for New Zealand. What we have also continually reiterated on this side of the House is that Labour is a party that supports free trade. We always have, throughout our history, supported good agreements that are good for New Zealand, but we do not see this as one of them. We see this as far more than a trade agreement, and we see that this legislation, which is enabling that agreement, simply does not make sense.

What we also see is that we have not had the proper analysis that could have gone through. We had a process that we consider to have been rushed. We consider that people were not given the full opportunity—it was a huge document that the public were very engaged with and they really wanted their opportunity to be heard, and it is something that we could have done a much better job on if we had had the chance. There are questions that people wanted to come to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee to ask. They wanted to come and look at the magnitude of the 0.9 percent GDP change forecast by the Government as a result of the TPP implementation by 2030. Contrast that sharply with the expected business-as-usual GDP of 47 percent over the same time period. We all want to see our exporters doing well—we all want to see that happen—but it was never fully explained how it was that entering into this agreement was going to deliver the kinds of benefits that the Government was talking about.

Then we had the Tufts University analysis. So there was some analysis that was done that actually raised some alarming points that needed to be listened to, and they certainly were points that we listened to, on this side of the House. There could indeed be job losses arising from this agreement, and unemployment. The analysis foreshadowed that there could be as many as 6,000 jobs lost in New Zealand by 2025 as a direct consequence of the agreement. The prospect of 6,000 jobs going, under an agreement where we are looking at a 0.9 percent increase in GDP by 2030, is not something that we saw as a stellar deal for New Zealand. We did not see it as New Zealand getting a huge benefit from this.

The Tufts University study also forecast that the labour share of output—that is, wages and salaries—would see a fall of 1.5 percent over that period. Presiding over falling wages is not what we are here to do on this side of the House. We do not want to put in place agreements that are going to see wages drop. What we need to do is have a clear vision for our country, and that does include trade. It does include trading with the outside world, and we have never contested that. What we have contested is that this agreement was going to be the answer.

I am still waiting, and I would like to hear—the Government has one final chance in this debate to tell us—what it is that we are doing here now. Why is it that we are putting through this legislation when this is a dead deal? This is not a deal that is going to go ahead. We did not hear, in the preceding months as this was going through, any cogent argument about how this was going to be a good deal for New Zealand. We had the Minister who presided over it, Tim Groser, saying he would walk away from the deal if there was not a good deal for dairy. There was not a good deal for dairy, but he certainly did not walk away. There has just been silence from Government members on this piece of legislation. In this final call in this debate, I would actually like to hear what it is we are doing here. Why are we here passing legislation for a deal that is not going to happen? Thank you.

It is a pleasure to take the final call on this bill, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Amendment Bill. I want to weave in some of the themes that some of the colleagues before me have spoken about. I want to talk about three things. I want to talk around a general theme of protections. I want to talk about Māori engagement and protections, general protections, and pharmaceutical protections. You heard our colleague Nuk Korako speak about the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to the Māori economy. I want to talk to some of the protections that are there for Māori.

First of all, Māori had multiple opportunities to engage in this process, going all the way back to 2008. If we look at some of those contributors they are significant players in the Māori economy: Sealord, Aotearoa Fisheries Ltd, Te Ohu Kaimoana, Tainui, and Ngāi Tahu have all been engaged for many years over this process. I think protections for Māori are also very clear under the Treaty of Waitangi carve-out, which, I believe, does provide protections, and I support what Nuk Korako was saying in this area as well.

I want to then talk to general domestic protections. What is the effect of this on the general New Zealand domestic market? Well, we know that there are particular protections for them as well. They are protected by amendments that we are making to the Tariff Act through two prime mechanisms. First of all, there are transitional safeguard measures. These are measures for domestic industries that might feel they are harmed by aspects of the TPP, and their remedy in response to that, following appropriate process and discussion, is that any further relief or reduction in tariffs can be halted immediately, and customs duty can be imposed on those imports thought to be harming our domestic market. Textiles and clothing have something extra. They can use emergency measures, which, effectively, do the same: they put a halt to any further tariff reductions, but they can also raise tariff duties on the offending product, and that can last for many years. These protection measures can last for several years.

Finally, I want to talk about pharmaceutical protections, and I want to talk first of all about the patent term extension. This is the period from application to marketing approval, and it covers delayed marketing approval. I want to talk to several points. First of all, New Zealand does not have a patent term extension beyond the general patent term of 20 years. Most OECD countries do. Up until 1994, we actually did have patent term extensions. You could extend them up to 10 years, and, on average, the extension was about 7.5 years. This was revoked in 1994, and what we did instead was increase the general patent protection from 16 years to 20 years. We have heard about the impact for New Zealand of this patent term extension, which is proposed as 5 years—that it is to be small. It is likely to be small because—if we imagine, again, that the reason for this is delays in marketing approval—we are very efficient at that. Medsafe, the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand—they are very efficient at getting market approval, and so the advice to us is that the impact of this aspect of pharmaceutical protections will be small.

The final protection I want to then talk about is biologic protection, which goes on from the marketing approval period onward. It is also known as data protection or data exclusivity. The principle here is that innovation of very expensive medicines, especially biologics, needs to be encouraged. They need some protection from generics. We need to imagine that 40 percent of new pharmaceuticals are, in fact, biologics. Many are especially used for inflammatory conditions, such as psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. New Zealand already has a 5-year biologic exclusivity period, and we join Australia in that sort of time frame—and Chile, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Canada and Japan have 8 years, and, of course, the US has 12 years. There was clearly a desire and an intention to try to drag our 5 years more towards the 12 years. Where we settled was mostly still around the 5 years, as a 5-year plus other framework.

These are three sets of protections that I think provide a lot of surety to our domestic market and to the whole trade environment here. There are definitely benefits and protections for Māori, general domestic protections, and pharmaceutical protections as well. With that, it is my absolute pleasure to commend this bill to the House.