On Wednesday, the fine folks at Wikileaks published the draft sections of the TPPA dealing with Healthcare.
It makes for pretty grim reading.
Basically, regardless of the Prime Minister’s breathless assurances that PHARMAC will be protected … the TPPA will grant pharmaceutical companies unprecedented rights of access and challenge to PHARMAC’s decision-making process.
Company representatives – who’ve already been granted *far* more information about the text of the treaty than you or I or even our MPs – will be able to sit in on PHARMAC’s meetings. Not only that, under the Investor-State Dispute mechanisms in the TPPA … if they don’t like a particular decision, they’ll be free to sue OUR state in order to get their way.
So as far as I’m concerned, when John Key says PHARMAC will be protected by his government – he is simply lying. Just like he did when he promised his government would not raise GST.
New Zealand First’s Fletcher Tabuteau MP puts it bluntly: “We’ve already had the Saudi debacle in which the government paid a bribe to two businessmen. At the same time the Prime Minister claims we can’t stop Koreans buying land here because of the free trade agreement. That’s why New Zealand First is determined to stop any future governments signing agreements that allow corporations to sue us, which is what our Bill, Fighting Foreign Corporate Control, is all about.”
He’s absolutely right. Time and time again, this government has used international agreements and the lure of filthy lucre as “justification” to renege on its commitment to our citizens in favour of rolling out the red carpet for foreign capital.
That’s not good enough. And I, for one, am infinitely glad that New Zealand First has taken the lead in defending our sovereignty on this one.
If you’re interested, you can check out the text of Fletcher’s awesome Fighting Foreign Corporate Control bill here.
Meanwhile, you can help the struggle by writing to your local MP and making it plain how you feel about this issue. Better still, write to a Government MP – and get your friends, family and co-workers to do the same.
I know that when it comes to consultation, this government seems to have the tinniest ear of any in living memory – but as we saw with the backdown over mining in the Coromandel, when they feel they may be facing swathes of electoral oblivion … they CAN be forced to be reasonable!
Over to you.
Bob Amsterdam speaking at kim dotcoms moment of truth (which apparently went WAAAY over the heads of a good percentage of nzers) said that once ttpa was implemented, (it has a 5 year ban on the details becoming public) putting the genie back in the bottle would be impossible as the monster will be imbedded in the global system
…it has a 5 year ban on the details becoming public….
Good luck with that it seems.So much text has been released already that we are in danger of forgetting that we were never meant to have seen any. And the leaks seem to have been taking rather less than 5 years…
Why 5 years? So the MPs who negotiated it in ‘secret’ have 5 years to put their affairs in order and resign before it is discovered exactly how they sold their public out. Unable to sack them, we will then have no recourse but to shake our fists helplessly in the air…
I wish them luck with that one too 🙂
I’d say all this leaking has been a jolly nuisance for them and a lot of effort will have been made to stop it, which just keeps on failing. Why?
Well no matter how carefully all participants are told that public betrayal is necessary and they must promise on their honour to lie about doing so as much as necessary (and threats can be added in case they waver), in spite of all the NSA can do there remain a few, vigorously sought but still undiscovered participants who so believe in the public’s right to know that they take all that personal risk and publish.
Before Dear Leader and his Darling Cabinet can be dealt with appropriately by the public they are so busy betraying, we need to know how low they will go, in the current situation whereby the Cabinet may legally sign off this thing all by itself.
However, that will change. And we will know how low they stooped.
Will Sir Key, no longer PM by then, have got clean away with it?!? No. A future Parliament will revoke his Sir, and his flag with it (this has already started).
He may pretend that he’s happy, that his bankster mates love him, and that he needs nowhere else.
But he will be fooling himself. He will have sold his home.
And there will be no returning from that.
“Why 5 years? So the MPs who negotiated it in ‘secret’ have 5 years to put their affairs in order and resign before it is discovered exactly”
Yep.
JFK (the real one) was assassinated and USA hid details for 45 years.
At least the TPPA information will be out in 5 years. Unless they get to 4 years and 11 months, then embargo it for another 40.
Problem sorted
Gosman and the trolls haven’t been voting comments down here yet? Maybe Gosman is in training for UFC NZ – the reality show that replaces 3D…..or 7 Days.
Easier to vote down comments, Winnie, than make intelligent responses. Mind you, even their parroted right wing cliches are looking tired these days, so Voting Down is all they have left…
Even embedded foreign particles can be removed.
meaning key will say or do anything to pass it as going back and saying he lied will do nothing and he would come up with a keyism to minimize any comments
John Key on Tv lying through his teeth said pharmac wont be affected by TTP,his sly uncomfortable look when he said “i havnt seen the details”Like hell he hasn’t ,he was in on it in the beginning. when and if TPP is enacted Key will blame Tim Grosser and expect to be believed.
Key dosnt care who he throws under the bus as he is doing with Murray Mcully and the Saudi sheep deal ,what is wrong with these mps are they stupid or blackmailed.
Whats stuffed up is now that the media is owned by mates that love jk, he is free to go on tv with no real threat to his leadership.
Here’s a good interview from a United States perspective at Democracy Now. It’s not good for the American health system either
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/11/backlash_against_tpp_grows_as_leaked
Right Curwen,
Many people are allergic to many prescription drugs including me, so no one is safe here and under TPPA you wont be able to sue the maker if the drug kills anyone in your family as they are exempt from prosecution.
All because the Drug companies wrote those provisions into the TPPA to protect themselves, = legalised killing.
Best stick to natural supplemental treatments.
Whenever John Key speaks I have to ask myself is he lying again or just really stupid?
Lying. By no means is he stupid.
I’ve come to the conclusion (belatedly) that all politicians are either dishonest or stupid. Some are both!
That’s what the really dishonest would want you to believe, so when caught out they can claim it doesn’t matter because ‘everyone does it’ and ‘nothing can be done to fix it’.
No, they don’t, and yes, something can be done – it’s what we are doing here, a bit at a time.
No, not all politicians. Some are there to be of service to the country but the number seems to have seriously declined since the 4th Labour Government ushered in the me, me, me paradigm of neo-liberalism and made legal and encouraged immoral actions.
Yep, don’t need to ask if he’s lying – just assume that he is.
I think we are fooling ourselves if we think Key would settle here after he either :
a) loses an election
b ) tires of the whole thing of being PM
c) gets offered a cushy post near say , New York to resume his money go round
d) gets rolled by Hootens back bench kids
e) his heated swimming pool breaks down and goes all nasty and chilly
Look…this guy has NO intention whatsoever of sticking around here with $55,000,000 in his bank account. He’ll slink back to Hawaii , play his golf and get even richer.
He will even be asked to be a guest speaker at the Bilderbergers annual meetings – where he will receive a standing ovation.
He will probably even have a framed and stamped congratulatory letter on his wall in that Hawaiin mansion from all his neo liberal banker mates for a job well done in New Zealand for getting the TTPA and TISA signed and pushed through on their behalf.
Key the quintessential globalist.
Never forget JUST who this man really is.
And what he was sent here for originally.
Watch this I did tonight, as the latest wikileaks leak opf TPPA health agreement is about to be agreed to.
We are being screwed by corporate mafia and Obama is helping to get Corporate medicine extended for another 20yrs for free so they will kill all competition in future even with old retired medicines again.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/11/backlash_against_tpp_grows_as_leaked
Just saw headline on CNN. USA lawmakers rejected trade deals , yehhhhhhhhhhhhh .
Just a quick segment on trade deal on Fox then so far nothing .Majority of democrats rejected deal overwhelmingly. White house says will vote again in 4 days. Obama calls it a Snafu whatever that is . Not on CNN now, none of other channels saying anything so far.
Correction , the vote to stop workers getting compensation if affected by tpp and tirsa,but it means by the sound of it that they cant get tpp and tirsa agreed to either.
Had to search for this info ,was only on fox and cnn and said trade deals overwhelmingly rejected,itdidnt say which deals, tpp was supposed to be voted on but dosnt say outcome or if it was voted on.
Fletcher’s bill is both overly specific and too broad at the same time, which is quite an achievement for how short it is.
Ruling out all ISDS mechanisms is not sufficient to fight foreign corporate control from the TPPA alone, let alone in all trade deals, let alone in general.
Also, ISDS mechanisms like the one in the TPPA are reasonable when they are applied to states like, for instance, North Korea, where the government cannot be relied upon to be an honest actor, there are no reasonable trade laws or protections, and the government isn’t a democracy.
This bill could be fixed up pretty reasonably to say one of the following: “New Zealand must not agree to any ISDS curtailing our sovereign right to make our own laws for the benefit of our citizens.” or “New Zealand must not agree to any ISDS applying within New Zealand borders that is not arbitrated in an independent court of law.”
Most of the problem with the ISDS in the TPP is that it’s a bunch of corporate lawyers deciding things outside a court of law with no guarantee that they’ll be independent from corporate interests, and thus no incentive to rule in favour of regulation protecting ordinary citizens. They are doing this because ISDS mechanisms that actually go to a real court cause mendacious corporate lawsuits to fail, like the lawsuit in Aussie against cigarette plain packaging. ISDS provisions, *when written well*, prevent things like Australia claiming they won’t take our apples due to fireblight when countries are supposedly engaged in free(r) trade with each other, but don’t curtail our sovereign rights to make laws to protect citizens from legitimate health risks or other consequences of free trade.
Not high Curwen, but definitely knowingly misleading.
These people who are pushing the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement are very intelligent people. They know what they are doing. They know that if they admit to what they are doing, it would pass as an impeachable offence under the constitutions of some countries, or at the least sufficiently bad enough to ensure that they are out of office at the next election for quite some time.
I don’t think Groser, Key or anyone else who is promoting this is on something. I think they know exactly what they are doing and why, and it is not about helping New Zealand.
[…] Because as with the TPPA and PHARMAC – the health of our citizens is far better served by evidence-based policy than it is by right-wing political scaremongering. […]
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