International Treaty Examination of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to take a call in relation to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill, as well as the report of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee on the international treaty examination of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement.

I’ll start my call today with a quote from the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, who said, “I am a multilateralist. I am deeply convinced that there is no other way to deal with global challenges than with global responses, and organised in a multilateral way.” Now, I’m not a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, but I am delighted to be able to speak to what I consider is a significant moment in our COVID economic recovery by way of progressing our trade recovery strategy, which will broaden and deepen our trade connections in the region. Ultimately, this is about having a single rule book for all 15 signatories, which should significantly reduce complexity and therefore compliance costs for exporters.

I just want to take a moment to think about the impact that COVID has had on trade across the region. In April, the International Labour Organization issued a brief titled COVID-19 and multinational enterprises: Impacts on FDI, trade, and decent work in Asia and the Pacific. They acknowledged in that report the impact of COVID on small, medium, but also large businesses in the regions, as well as in terms of cross regional trade, and they noted that COVID had required some businesses to put in place stringent measures to prevent the spread of COVID, others had temporarily closed, and some others had had to really shift or repurpose their production processes. There were significant disruptions to supply chains, all of which, of course, had a really significant impact on trade. But the brief also makes the point that, against this backdrop, Governments are faced with a dual duty both to keep COVID out but also to sow the seeds of sustainable recovery, and that’s really what this agreement is about.

So what does the bill do? Well, the bill is really an omnibus bill that makes the required legislative amendments to give effect to New Zealand’s signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. It’s a free-trade agreement signed by 15 countries which are home to almost a third of the world’s population, including seven of our 10 trading partners who take over half of New Zealand’s total exports and provide more than half of our direct foreign investment. It is significant.

The difference RCEP will make is shown through some modelling work that’s been done which shows that once RCEP is fully in effect, New Zealand’s annual GDP will be between 0.3 percent and 0.6 percent larger than if RCEP had not existed at all, which is, in dollar terms, equal to a range of $1.5 billion to $3.2 billion. It is extremely significant for New Zealand. What it means for New Zealand is that we’ll have a seat at the governance table of this globally significant regional economic agreement. Essentially, this keeps the goods flowing and services moving across Asia Pacific. It builds our relationship with, as I said, seven of our top 10 trading partners, including Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia. And here I just note that New Zealand exported over $36 billion worth of goods to RCEP countries and nearly $12 billion of services in the year ending December 2019. This sends a strong message that the region is open for business and will make such a practical difference to our exporter industry in the coming years as we recover from COVID.

Just in terms of the numbers, RCEP will cover around 61 percent of New Zealand’s goods exports and 45 percent of our service exports. But, of course, it’s not just about us, it’s not just about New Zealand, so I do want to reflect on some of the words of our partners as we continue on with our obligations towards this agreement. Mohamed Azmin Ali, the Minister of International Trade and Industry of Malaysia, said that RCEP would encourage local businesses to enter global markets and would increase Malaysia’s exports. He stated that RCEP signatories would enjoy preferential treatment due to the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Joko Widodo, the President of Indonesia, talked about the signing of RCEP as a historic day that signalled Indonesia’s strong commitment to multilateralism. And Moon Jae-in, the President of South Korea, has praised RCEP as an unprecedented mega regional trading agreement and expressed confidence that it will contribute to the recovery, multilateralism, and the development of free trade around the world and actually beyond the region as well.

In terms of the report of the select committee on the international treaty examination, while this is a first reading of the bill, it’s also, in effect, the debate on the report of the committee on the RCEP agreement, so I do also want to reflect briefly on some of the comments noted in the March report. Specifically, the committee noted that, actually, most of the obligations in RCEP are already met through current legal frameworks and policy regimes. But there are a small number of legislative changes that do need to be made, which I’ll mention here.

The first is amending the Tariff Act 1988 to enable the identification of RCEP countries and changes to the definition of tariff through Order in Council. The second is an amendment to the Act to provide for eight years of transitional safeguard mechanisms. These really aim to provide temporary relief to domestic industry from unfair competition or an unexpected surge in imports. And the third is changing the Customs and Excise Regulations 1996 to implement the agreed rules of origin and product-specific rules for goods imported from RCEP countries.

At this stage, I might just pause and speak briefly to the exceptions clause in RCEP. As in New Zealand’s other international agreements, RCEP contains an exceptions clause that aims to preserve the pre-eminence of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in New Zealand. Now, essentially, this means that nothing in RCEP will prevent the Crown from implementing domestic policies to meet its obligations to Māori under Te Tiriti. What it means is the Government’s interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi cannot be subject to disputes settlements. While I understand that some members of the committee expressed concern about this clause in particular, this is a clause that’s present in all of New Zealand’s trade agreements. And I understand that the advice from the ministry is that the clause is effective, not to mention, in my view, consistent with the State’s obligations under Te Tiriti.

The committee also made inquiries into the effect of RCEP on intellectual property rights. I understand the advice was that RCEP reinforces the standards that already exist as set out in the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. Those standards, essentially, cover copyrights, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs and patents, amongst other things as well.

So, just in conclusion, I’d like to thank the committee for its report in relation to the treaty examination, and I do commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise as a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee to speak on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill. It is not a pleasure, however, to look at what this bill and what the agreement itself entails; it’s actually quite a disappointment.

Let’s start with what it does well. We know that we came out of the last term of Parliament and Government with a comprehensive list of recommendations by our Trade for All agenda commission. And we’d spent a lot of time engaging with the public, with experts, and with sectors to come up with that. We recognised that trade as it had been done for decades was failing us as an international community. In fact, it had very clearly led to the last global economic crisis, whereby traders—big, multibillion-dollar, multi-national traders—had set the agenda for global policy, trickling down into domestic policy. They had decided that their profits would sit above our environmental concerns, our workers’ rights, our human rights, and our indigenous people’s rights. So we decided, as a Government last term, that we would do things differently. One of the recommendations, and one that I acknowledge is actually reflected in this agreement, is that it doesn’t contain those controversial investor-State dispute settlement clauses whereby international—multi-national, I should say, because these aren’t actually traders that have any kind of allegiance to any one State party, they are just multibillion-dollar corporates—can’t sue us as a Parliament or successive Parliaments for passing legislation that would uphold the interests of us as people above their profits. That’s good. Also, it doesn’t include pharmaceuticals, that’s also good.

That’s about where it ends, because this agreement, in fact, in a way represents a regression of the position that we were so upset about and New Zealand was so deeply hurt by when our Government last term signed on to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA). It doesn’t include any environmental chapter. Now, the criticism of the TPPA was that it included a novel environmental chapter but that it wasn’t termed in enforceable terms and that 86 percent of cases failed where Governments tried to enforce their environmental rights and protections against the profit margins of a multi-national. It wasn’t good enough. This agreement doesn’t include any environmental protection. We sit in the midst of a global climate crisis. We as a Government apparently see this as our nuclear-free moment. We as the Green Party are deeply concerned that a trade agreement like this sits above our commitments in the climate justice arena. It sits above what our Climate Commission is doing, the work that all of our ministries have committed to. It doesn’t include an environmental chapter at all, and that, actually, has become routine. So that’s a huge failure.

It doesn’t include a workers’ rights chapter. Again, even the TPPA had a loose—and I would argue unenforceable for the most part—workers’ rights chapter, a recognition that inviting multibillion-dollar traders into our world would impact on workers’ rights and that those rights should be protected. This agreement regresses from that position, and that’s scary. It’s scary in the age of COVID. It’s a scary move in our Asia-Pacific neighbourhood. We know that manufacturing happens on a massive scale in some of these nations that have signed on to this. So what have we negotiated? What have we undermined? Whose interests are we protecting when we sign on to trade deals? Whose interests are we privileging over who? So the most marginalised are the most threatened by this agreement, be that the environment or workers.

Now I come to the rights of indigenous peoples. A commitment that this Government makes over and over again to partnership with Māori, to upholding the values of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and actually, in fact, meeting our obligations, because they are enforceable obligations. We’ve heard that this agreement does include a clause on the protection of our obligations pursuant to the Treaty of Waitangi. We’ve also heard from the only independent expert arbiter of what, in fact, fulfils our obligations pursuant to Te Tiriti, the Waitangi Tribunal, that this exact clause is a breach, falls short. Why is it still in here? Why has the Government continued to use the exact words that were ruled to fall short of meeting our obligations pursuant to Te Tiriti o Waitangi? Of course, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade came to select committee and said that, in their opinion, it meets our obligations. They wrote it. That judgment was a finding against them. So the Government can’t hold up their opinion that’s already been ruled to fall short as meeting the obligation, as evidence that the obligation’s being met. It’s an absolute failure.

Then we come to a broader issue, which is the way that we actually sign on to trade agreements and a way that this particular agreement, again entrenched in breach of the recommendations of our Trade for All agenda. Why did we do it if we’re going to keep doing trade the same old way? They recommended that there be independent national impact assessments of trade agreements. There isn’t one here. They recommended that trade agreements be negotiated in a more transparent and democratic way. We as the House of Representatives are now bound by a trade agreement that was negotiated in secret, that had the input of multi-national, multibillion-dollar agents that sit here benefiting from the terms of the agreement behind closed doors while we were shut out, and now we are bound to implement the agreement as elected officials. Well, we should have had input at a different stage. The people of New Zealand should have known what’s going on, what’s in the mandate for this negotiating team, what is being negotiated, and had a say on whether or not this is, in fact, a good trade agreement.

New Zealand needs trade. We’re a small island nation, we absolutely need trade. We need trade to be sustainable, to be fair, to uphold our workers’ rights, to uphold our obligations pursuant to the climate treaties that we signed on to, our obligations to our indigenous people pursuant to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and this agreement, unfortunately, falls short. So I don’t commend this bill to the House.

If I may transport this House back to the year 2016, it was before 5G; it was before Bill Gates became a conspirator; it was before COVID; it was before the vaccines. It was back in the day when the craziest political operators in New Zealand—and the Greens, but why repeat yourself—were campaigning against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the big, scary agreement that would take away our sovereignty. And guess what! It was negotiated in secret—because who negotiates out in the open and tells everyone what their bottom lines are before they go into the negotiation? Those were the days.

There was a woman at Waitangi that year, and she threw her sex toy at Steven Joyce’s head to make the point. Those were the days. I wish we could go back to those happier, simpler times when all the conspiracy theorists in New Zealand were just focused on the TPP. But just momentarily, just for a wee moment, Golriz Ghahraman transported me back to those wonderful times, when she talked about how terrible the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership will be. People will have to have rules so that they can understand each other and trade and exchange goods with people from other countries, and we’re going to get richer doing it, because we have things they want and they have things we want. By exchanging them, trading value for value, we can get stronger together. That’s what trade is about. It is voluntary cooperation amongst adults who are different actually making a virtue of their differences to exchange things and be better off than they would be alone.

One has to wonder why the Green Party are so comprehensively opposed to free-trade agreements. They’re certainly not opposed to free-trade agreements when it comes to their personal consumption. Do you see Green MPs with New Zealand - made cell phones? No. They all have Apple—designed in California, made in China. Do they come up and down from Auckland, where most of them live, to Parliament, here, in New Zealand - made aeroplanes? Has anyone seen a Richard Pearse special going up and down the North Island, transporting Green MPs to the Parliament? No. No, the Green Party are more than happy to believe in free trade for their own choices, but they somehow have a phobia when it comes to making agreements with people from other countries for everyone else.

Then we hear from Golriz Ghahraman “This doesn’t comply with our Treaty of Waitangi obligations.” What on earth? Was there a promise from the Crown to iwi that we would all be mercantilist xenophobes from 1840 onwards? No, there wasn’t. Māori at that time were some of the most enthusiastic traders that there were, and still are. The idea that to honour the Treaty is not to want to interact with the rest of the world is not only wrong; it’s frankly paternalistic and a little bit insulting. I say this as tangata whenua myself. Don’t you know? I’m Ngāpuhi.

Now, what this legislation is really about, now that we’ve got our points in rebuttal out of the way in the first four minutes, is actually creating an agreement and giving it legislative intent or legislative approval by this House so that we can trade more easily, with a wider range of people. It’s important at this particular point in New Zealand’s history that we are able to diversify the range of trade opportunities that New Zealanders have for selling their goods from their farms and their firms to provide for themselves and their friends and their families.

It’s critical that we have a range of options for selling our goods and services. The more diverse the better, because diversifying our markets here in New Zealand means that we have more options and fewer countries—and, specifically, fewer Governments—have the opportunity to blackmail New Zealand by threatening to turn the tap off. For the geopolitics alone, trade is a wonderful thing. This agreement is a wonderful thing. It is people coming together and creating value but having more people to come together with so that New Zealand is less vulnerable to geopolitical manoeuvrings of certain countries. That could only be a positive thing.

But perhaps the Green Party and other opponents are somehow opposed to what trade has done for the world. They talk about poor people. Well, let’s have a bit of reality. There are fewer poor people in the world than there have ever been, and the reason for that is trade. Over the last 40 years, the evil neoliberal era, billions of people have had jobs, have had capital investment, have gained skills, have had opportunity to do what people in New Zealand would like to do: to exchange value for value, get stronger together, to have somewhere to sell the goods from their farms and their firms, to provide for their friends and their families. Billions of people have come out of poverty.

Just two years ago, for the first time in human history, less than 10 percent of humanity lived in absolute poverty. It’s swept through China. It’s sweeping through Vietnam, who are part of this. Before that, it swept through South Korea. Let us hope that one day the North Koreans stop practising so much Green Party policy and they are able to live free and trade and become wealthier and escape absolute poverty too. Let’s hope that it sweeps through Africa, and all those impoverished people that we see on the World Vision ads with the distended bellies are able to trade and create value and get the things they need to live better lives, and that we reduce poverty on the dark continent as well.

This is the future. It is not only a good thing that we are trading for ourselves; it’s actually a power of good for the world. You have to ask yourself: why would the Green Party be opposed to that? Well, I can only guess that it’s simply about control. You see, the defining characteristic of the left in New Zealand is not kindness or a will to do better. People on this side of the House have those values, thank you very much. What defines the left in New Zealand and beyond is a will to have control.

They don’t like free trade. They don’t like a framework and a set of rules that means that someone with a firm producing a product has a wider range of people to sell to. They don’t like the fact that we have a wider range of goods to purchase. They don’t like the fact that we can make choices in our lives about which adults we do business with, even if they’re in other countries. They don’t like it. They like to be able to control the goods and services that New Zealanders consume and the customers that New Zealanders serve. Free trade is bad news for big Government because it gives people options and alternatives that the Government, which evolved to control the nation State, cannot dominate. It gives us options and opportunities outside our borders, and that is what the left in New Zealand hates. In a word, it is freedom.

But don’t worry too much. Don’t worry, colleagues in this House, because we know from the Green Party’s own behaviour that they don’t really believe it. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Members, it’s come time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

Sitting suspended from 6.04 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Ā, kāti rā, tēnā rā tātou katoa. The House is resumed. Members, before the dinner break we were debating the first reading of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill and also noting the international treaty examination of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. The next call is a Labour Party call.

It’s a pleasure to start tonight’s session with my contribution on the bill before us, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill. Can I start by sharing something that I read on the Prime Minister’s Instagram on the morning of 15 November. She posted saying “Trade is so important to us. A huge number of jobs in New Zealand are reliant on exports. That’s why it’s so important that while our borders are closed, we keep co-operating with others to make sure our goods can keep moving and don’t face costly barriers. Today, after years of negotiating, we signed the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. It covers 15 countries, and the largest population of any trade agreement in the world. It means our exporters will have a single set of rules across the region, and it will improve some of the rules our exporters face too. In all, this agreement will increase New Zealand’s GDP by $2billion, and still protects things that matter to New Zealand. Today we signed the agreement ‘virtually’. I hope that didn’t lessen the sense of achievement for all those [that] worked on this project for so many years!” Can I just echo that sentiment, to thank all of the officials for whom I know this agreement has been, indeed, a very long work process for them.

I was really proud to see our Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, and our current Minister of trade and enterprise, the Hon Damien O’Connor, on the chequerboard screenshot, joining leaders from all the other countries who represent just under one-third of the world’s population.

As my colleagues have already—and even Opposition MPs who have contributed before the dinner break—outlined, trade is extremely important for a small economy like ours. This agreement was signed to modernise the way we do trade. Tonight I’d like to draw the House’s attention to particularly the e-commerce chapter of this agreement. E-commerce—or electronic commerce, we call it—offers important opportunities for a small country like ours that is distant and also a trading country that we call New Zealand; a really, really important opportunity for us to connect with the rest of the world. Through the negotiations, we’ve constantly been trying to balance that with the need to include adequate safeguards for legitimate public policy purposes, including to protect the privacy and the interests of consumers, and that, I believe, we have.

This agreement gives New Zealand exporters increased business opportunities by outlining the importance of frameworks that promote consumer confidence in electronic commerce and the importance of facilitating the development of the use of e-commerce. E-commerce may, to most people just simply mean internet shopping—something I definitely enjoy participating in. But this is much more beyond that. As COVID hit the whole entire world, we know that a lot of our businesses, especially our small to medium enterprises, had to move to online in order for them to survive. So this agreement, what it does is it sets up the framework for New Zealand to be able to participate, our small and medium enterprises are able to participate in this online world of e-commerce to better the infrastructure so that they can actually survive. I think COVID has highlighted the incredible importance that all of our small to medium enterprises have that capacity and that capability to participate in the digital economy.

The parties to this agreement have given the agenda to work together to assist these small and medium enterprises, to overcome the obstacles used in e-commerce, whether that’s infrastructure that we’ve mentioned before, or whether that’s just simply by upskilling the people in business, or whether that is to knock down barriers in terms of their participation in e-commerce, those are all things to be applauded because, at the end of the day—New Zealand, as a small island nation—we need to rely on trade, and through the internet, to close that distance between us and the rest of the world.

This agreement couldn’t have come at a better time. During the global pandemic, we saw the importance of connecting with each other and how reliant we were on technology to do that for us, and for us to maintain that connection, whether it was with whānau domestically in New Zealand or whether that was with the rest of the world through digital commerce and other ways. I think this agreement will now facilitate that connection for us as New Zealand.

It was also reflective of the time that this was signed that the signing ceremony itself was done virtually and online. I think this goes to reflect the new and modern world that we live in and the changes that we have had to make in order to accommodate the changes and the disruptions that we are facing on a day-to-day level.

As we eagerly await the Budget on Thursday, we know that the Government’s priority is extremely clear, securing on recovery. Securing on recovery to me, and in this context that we’re debating today, is—one of the important pillars to that recovery is our trade recovery strategy. This agreement contributes to that by broadening and deepening our trade and investment links with the rest of the world. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

This next call is a split call. I call Nicola Grigg—five minutes.

Since I’ve had the privilege of being the member of Parliament for Selwyn, I have watched this Government slowly but surely turn the screws on our productive sector. Our primary industries and our manufacturers are subjected daily to regulatory requirements and scrutiny that only serve to reduce their ability to grow and expand, to employ more people, and to earn a living. It’s therefore a small concession, I suppose, that the Government is still seemingly interested in pursuing a free-trade agenda, and that, no doubt, will be a small consolation to those producers looking for markets for their products and services. I must say, it is with some relief that I’ve learnt the Minister for Trade and Export Growth is actually going to get on a plane and visit the EU and the UK to advance those much-needed free-trade agreements.

The National Party has a long, proud history of pursuing and securing high-quality, comprehensive trade agreements, and this is no exception. This House has the Hon Tim Groser to thank for that. Therefore, I join my colleagues in supporting this Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill and extend my warm greetings to the peoples of those RCEP nations. I do this because trade is about people, people who like us, who like our products, and who want to do business with us. We have come a long way from sending shiploads of frozen mutton from Port Chalmers to London in the 19th century, and that’s in part due to this country’s liberalised trade agenda but also to the agility and ambition of our exporters, particularly our primary producers. We now export about $82 billion in goods and services every year, and trade supports 600,000 Kiwis into jobs.

In opening up access to 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific, RCEP will bring tremendous opportunities to those manufacturers and producers that I’ve mentioned. It will cover trade in goods, trade in services, investment, economic and technical cooperation, intellectual property, competition, and dispute settlement. It also recognises ASEAN as an emerging regional economic architecture. While the great nation of India is not currently a signatory, we stand willing and ready to welcome them if and when they wish.

As a former agri-portfolio manager at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), I’ve witnessed first-hand how difficult it is to achieve both market access and market traction, let alone see sales and profit. Export is a long, hard graft. The Productivity Commission’s recently reported on how the so-called select group of frontier firms have achieved traction and growth, but this House should be under no illusion it’s been done easily; those wins are hard-fought. NZTE research shows that the five major challenges for our exporters are building brand awareness, finding the right partners and channels, strong overseas competition, understanding how offshore markets differ from New Zealand markets, and determining the right export pricing strategy and product-related costs to remain competitive and profitable. Historically, our economies relied heavily on a few primary commodities for exports, and I disagree with this volume-to-value mantra that the Government’s using, because I think it devalues the high-quality products that we have historically exported. We are, however, increasingly seeing offshore consumers becoming more discerning.

As I’ve previously said in this House, Selwyn is an economic powerhouse, underpinned by the work of our local exporters, especially our food producers. But in my travels across the electorate, I’ve met regularly with businesses screaming out for both better business support and more business opportunity. That opportunity will come with the RCEP agreement. It’s expected to significantly reduce complexity and compliance costs for exporters through a single rule book for 15 markets. I hope that perhaps the Government would apply that same ethos back here at home. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s my pleasure today to take a call on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill, or, in short, the RCEP bill. While I’m not on the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, I’ve had a bit of experience working on a project related to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement with Vietnam around exporting Vietnamese agriculture products to other countries. The RCEP bill is an omnibus bill that amends the Tariff Act 1988 and the Customs and Excise Act 2018 in order to give effect to the RCEP agreement, which New Zealand signed on 15 November 2020.

The bill will enable the application of preferential tariff rates under the RCEP. The RCEP free-trade agreement has been signed by 15 countries. Ten of those are part of the ASEAN network, and the other five are part of the extended free-trade agreement with ASEAN. Together these countries are home to almost a third of the world’s population. That is 2.3 billion people. And these 15 countries represent 30 percent of the global GDP and include seven out of 10 of our top trading partners.

RCEP will cover around 61 percent of New Zealand’s goods exports and 45 percent of our services exports. These countries take over half of New Zealand’s total exports and provide more than half of our direct foreign investment. New Zealand exported over $36 billion worth of goods to RCEP countries and nearly $12 billion of services in the year ending December 2019. Our existing free-trade agreements (FTAs) with the RCEP countries already provide high levels of goods market access, and the larger commercial gains are therefore in services and investment, progress on non-tariff barriers, and the benefits of a single rule book covering 15 countries. RCEP will therefore establish a consistent framework and a single set of services for the entire RCEP region. This will improve regulatory certainty and transparency for New Zealand service suppliers across the RCEP region as a whole and give them greater confidence to enter the markets.

The existing FTAs can be very complicated to use compared to RCEP. Businesses with global supply chains might face tariffs even within a FTA because their products contain components that are made elsewhere. A product made in Indonesia that contains New Zealand parts, for example, might face tariffs elsewhere in the ASEAN free-trade zone. Under RCEP, parts from any member nation would be treated equally, which might give companies in RCEP countries an incentive to look within the trade region for supplies. It means that a table made with New Zealand wood, Japanese bolts, and steel legs from China can be sold in Thailand or Indonesia under the same rules of origin certification, reducing compliance costs for businesses and incorporating New Zealand exporters into these supply chains.

New Zealand business has highlighted its concerns about the non-tariff barriers and RCEP will address these concerns through improved rules for goods trade, especially on customs procedures and some rules of origin, and sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and a specific mechanism to handle non-tariff barriers in future. This establishes a single set of trade and investment rules across all 15 countries, rather than a range of different rules which separate FTA partners, which has the potential to significantly reduce complexity and therefore compliance costs for exporters—for example, RCEP creates an expectation that the customs authority will release perishable goods, such as seafood, within six hours of arrival. RCEP will also improve existing market access for goods and especially services beyond those in our concluded FTAs.

RCEP also includes new services in investment market access commitments by some RCEP countries that go beyond existing FTAs. New Zealand’s approach to services in our FTAs recognises how much services matter to our economy. New Zealand will benefit from new commitments by some RCEP countries that go beyond existing FTAs. Like other regional trade agreements, RCEP will create more security and certainty for New Zealand exporters and make the trading environment more predictable.

I just want to briefly say that instead of just looking at what we get from this agreement, if we were not to join the RCEP agreement, we may see that our exporters will be precluded from participating in the regional supply chain network and this would mean loss of economic growth and opportunities and therefore relatively lower wellbeing and living standards for all New Zealanders. Having said that, I highly recommend this bill to select committee.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It gives me great pride to stand here tonight as the MP for Wairarapa, a region that is heavily dependent on the primary sector, and as their representative in this House, it gives me great pride to stand in support of this bill.

This bill is not so much just about the primary sector. It is about the whole economy, because we are a trading nation and the Labour Party is a party that stands proudly on its record of signing us up to trade agreements. That side of the House may laugh. They may giggle and they may joke amongst themselves, but they know that under the previous Labour Government, we signed us up to the China free-trade agreement. They know that this country is reaping the benefits of that free-trade agreement, and they also know—as they begrudgingly admit tonight—that this bill allows us and sets us up as a nation to take advantage of the economic benefits that this agreement and the bill that allows this partnership to come into force will bring to this nation.

By opening up our trade to, essentially, a third of the world’s population, it sets us up to achieve the goals that this Government has set for our economy. This is a part of the plan to increase export value by $44 billion over the next decade—a plan that this party took to the country at the last election—and, as part of a wider manifesto, it was resoundingly supported in every single rural electorate in the country. So while that side stands up here and says that this Government is placing huge impediment on the primary sector, that is the sector that backed us to deliver for them, and it is through that bill. They laugh. Let them laugh. Perhaps they need a reminder: 50 percent of the vote—50 percent of the vote—in every single rural seat.

So I can stand here with pride to say that we are delivering for those regions, and we are delivering for New Zealand manufacturers and we are delivering for New Zealand producers, because how else are we going to get $44 billion in increased export value? When we proposed that, they also laughed. Where was their plan? We’re getting on with the job, and this is part of that, because we know the future for economic prosperity in this country is based on increasing the value of our exports.

They criticise our plan around environmental sustainability without offering an option of their own, but they know deep down that our economic prosperity is in terms of giving consumers what they want, and the consumers in the markets that this bill allows us to sign up to—they don’t want to buy the cheapest product. We have never sold our products to those that want to buy the cheapest. We have always sold our products to the most discerning consumers in the world, and this bill gives us more access to those consumers, but those consumers don’t want agricultural products that impact on the environment. Those consumers do not want to buy primary products from a country that is not doing their bit for climate change.

We have to export—that’s the guts of this bill and the guts of this agreement. But if we were producing products in a way that doesn’t live up to our obligations—obligations that that Government signed us up to and that we’re happy to actually deliver—then we know that the value will not be reached.

We also know that consumers care more and more about animal welfare. They care more and more about other aspects like the way that industries in countries treat their staff. We are at the top of the world in so many areas, but we mustn’t be complacent, and the measures that we’re bringing in are setting us up to take advantage of the agreement that this bill sets us up for.

So I say to the other side, which—I note they’ve stopped laughing. I say to them, carry on as you are—carry on as you are. Make the news by your distractions. Make the news by arguing amongst yourselves and focusing on things that people don’t actually care about. We will carry on with the things that they care about. This bill is a big part of that, and when this bill comes through and we’re signed up to this partnership, exporters will know that it is this Government that’s set it up and delivered for them.

I actually came in expecting sort of a quiet night, but that’s been some great entertainment; I think it’s what you call a modular speech. The member who’s resumed his seat, Kieran McAnulty, had no idea what he was talking about, but, basically, just slotted in a few words every so often about trade on top of, as I say, a modular speech.

Look, fascinatingly, actually, it’s illustrative of three initial points I want to make. Isn’t it fascinating that we have the Government, effectively, filibustering itself all afternoon? They’ve got no other legislation to talk to, that they’re taking full calls on a very simple bipartisan trade bill.

The second part, which is really important about trade, because they wax lyrical—or, perhaps, wax boring—that the last trade deal that this House had to deal with, the member who resumed his seat and the whole lot of them, were out there protesting. That was called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was far more substantial than this. So I just think it’s absolutely fascinating, it’s quite “rich”, one would say.

The third part—

💬 Hon Phil Twyford: CPTPP.

That’s right, it’s now called the CPTPP. The great contribution of the Labour Party was to discover the letters “C” and “T”; rather than communism and Trotskyism, it was “comprehensive” and “partnership”. That was a good learning.

The third element is—it’s what’s really important for people to understand at home—this is a domestic piece of legislation to bring into effect a treaty, a trade agreement that was started by Tim Groser, and has been agreed to. So, look, it’s good—it’s good. OK. Thirty percent of the world’s population’s covered by this. About 30 percent of the world’s GDP, and over about, I think, 56 percent of New Zealand’s exports go into the area that the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) covers.

But let’s be clear, let’s not overcook this. OK. It’s good—it’s good. It’s a good agreement, but let’s not overcook this as some amazing free-trade agreement. This is bringing together existing bilaterals. New Zealand has relationships with all the countries in ASEAN, and through this RCEP agreement, that’s really good. So this builds on it, but I want the Government to be really clear—as it should be with the public—that this is not some amazing new trade agreement from scratch. It is building on existing bilateral agreements. So, as I say, let’s not overcook it. All trade’s positive. Build on it. But you would have thought from some of the speeches from the other side that this is an enormous breakthrough. Those breakthroughs already happened.

Probably what’s going to be the best coming out of this is a consistent approach to things like intellectual property, services, and investment frameworks. This is really, really good. So, look, a positive there. I think we want more of it. And that’s where I’m probably going to finish, you know, because the whole thing about trade is removing tariffs—let’s say, symbolically, I’ll remove time of me speaking, which is probably a great favour to the House. But, fundamentally, let’s celebrate RCEP. But the challenge to the Government is to actually get on with more bilateral agreements, which this House will endorse, and particularly with the UK and particularly with the EU. The message is simple: get on with it or, as the Labour Party might say, “Let’s do this.”

Tēnā koe, te Māngai o te Whare. It is my pleasure as a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee to speak at this first reading of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill. For those who are listening from home, RCEP is a treaty-level trade agreement agreed by 15 countries, 10 of those members belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). They are: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, plus five countries which ASEAN has free-trade agreements with. They are: Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand.

I think it’s important that the House and the members of the public understand what the implications of this treaty are. An estimate has been made that it will add between $1.5 billion and $3.2 billion to our GDP. Now, we shouldn’t scoff at anything that adds to our GDP, because actually that means more jobs, more opportunities for New Zealanders to contribute to the global economy. I think what also has to be shared was that, before this bill was introduced to the House, the select committee had an opportunity to look at this treaty-level free-trade agreement. We actually wrote a report that was released in March, and, really, there are four things that I want to highlight from our select committee report on the treaty that has then led to this bill being introduced to the House.

The first, really, is to highlight that this was supposed to include a 16th country, this RCEP agreement, and that was India. Unfortunately, India chose to withdraw, and for us in New Zealand that was a huge loss, because we saw that as an amazing opportunity to partner India and to allow our dairy products to infiltrate their market in a way that added value to the agreement that we had before us. They chose that this wasn’t the right time for them, they were worried about other products from other competing countries flooding their market and potentially having a detrimental effect on their domestic market. So they have chosen to withdraw, but I guess there’s hope for them to be included in the future, and I think the pathway going forward for us and India is to go to a bilateral agreement. I think everyone would like to have one, but as a small nation we could partner them and look at other opportunities to add value—I think that, going forward, there is hope that that is able to be had.

The reason that I’ve said that is that within trade agreements, there has been an insertion of an agenda called Trade for All. We saw that in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and, actually, we see that more and more in trade agreements globally. We’re starting to question trade for what purpose. It isn’t just about increasing our GDPs; it is about the environment. One of the other issues that was highlighted within our treaty examination was the fact that there is no environmental chapter in RCEP. We said that was incredibly disappointing, because if we don’t have a sustainable environment, then everything that we’re wanting to do is going to be more and more difficult to achieve.

In trade agreements, there has and has started to be a focus on indigenous peoples, and, again, that was one of the issues that we highlighted within our treaty examination. That is, is the Treaty of Waitangi exception clause fit for purpose? It’s an historic treaty clause that we, when we did propose it, broke ground, and now we’ve seen other jurisdictions add treaty clauses into their trade agreements, such as Canada. We also are aware that the UK is very cognisant of their responsibility, as an historical coloniser, of ensuring that indigenous peoples in these free-trade agreements have an opportunity for specific trade opportunities. So I’m highlighting that I think this will continue to be an issue and that, as we noted in our select committee report on the treaty, there are different perspectives on the treaty exception clause, it is before the Waitangi Tribunal, and I’m sure there will be submitters who again highlight that it is not fit for purpose as we venture into the future.

One of the other issues that was highlighted in the treaty examination was the use of geographic indicators (GIs), and I actually think geographic indicators are going to provide a really interesting pathway for New Zealand businesses. They do in the wine sector, and we have stunning wines that are marketed from the different regions of New Zealand. But within the dairy sector, I don’t think that’s quite taken off. We heard from Fonterra, for example, who have trademarked Kāpiti Kahurangi Creamy Blue cheese. So we’ve used trademarks as opposed to GIs, but I actually think kupu Māori going forward, such as mānuka—mānuka honey—or other indigenous terms for our product, I actually see developing in the future a real niche opportunity for particularly our Māori producers.

I also want to highlight the issue about trade agreements also benefiting workers and workers’ rights, and creating minimum standards for workers. We have those standards here and we have great developments by our Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, Michael Wood. Obviously, we’ve seen recently his announcement around fair pay agreements. Now, in these treaties, in these trade agreements, I think embedding workers’ rights is fundamental, actually, to making sure that trade is conducted in an ethical way. I think more and more, around the world, people are starting to look at how products are produced, who are producing these products, and are they being treated in a manner that enables them to have full participative lives. Because we are now realising that trade for trade’s sake actually isn’t the purpose of trade. The purpose of trade is to grow an economy that provides good quality jobs for our people, that enables them to be housed, that enables them to be clothed, that enables their children to go to school, and enables them to have a quality life, which means that they can participate in other ventures that society offers, whether it be sport or theatre or whatever it might be.

I think the examination that this piece of legislation provides about how this particular RCEP agreement is going to add value to the lifestyle that we not only enjoy in New Zealand but in those other countries, is something that we should note. Because we have moved into a space where we’ve seen the weaponisation of trade, and the dependency of some economies on particular countries in terms of our export markets, and that’s actually unsustainable in a world that’s focused on global peace and security.

That actually is a big philosophical change for the purpose of trade agreements. Creating a trade agreement that alleviates poverty and that creates a world that’s focused on peace and global security, I think is the challenge of our time. So we have to make sure that when we enter these trade agreements that we are very clear about the key performance indicators that we will create to measure how successful the implementation of these trade agreements are, not only within our own countries but within the partner countries that we choose to have these types of relationships with.

The reason I bring that up at the end of my speech is because issues such as modern slavery exist. Other jurisdictions have addressed issues of modern slavery. It remains legislative reform that is yet to be led in this Parliament, but I think it’s incredibly important that we have those tools and we have the knowledge to be able to mitigate what could be detrimental aspects of trade if we get it wrong. Kia ora.

The question is, That the report of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee on the International treaty examination of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement be noted.

Motion agreed to.

The question is, That the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Legislation Bill be considered by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee.

Instruction to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee