Make Trade Fair in the Pacific
We gain privileged access to Pacific markets, but they gain no new access to our markets. There are no obligations on Australia to stop their protectionist policies towards Pacific kava exports and other fruit and vegetables that are produced in Australia. New Zealand exporters will gain $20 million in reduced tariffs, but this is lost revenue for Pacific governments that are already struggling to provide basic health care and education to their people.
Read More →Maybe Trump doesn’t realise – this changes everything
Civil society is also mobilising and activists are mobilising to seize the opportunity. At last there is a deeply offensive target and outrageous behaviour to protest against, instead of the smooth lies and hypocrisy that have been covered over for years by clever PR strategies funded by ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel lobbies.
Read More →Stake Holders for the TPPA
It’s like a scene from a Dracula movie where the zombie comes back from the dead. The TPPA is dead but the TPPA-11, without the US, has just opened one eye. The idea of reviving the TPPA without the US, but still including all of the dangerous aspects that the US introduced into negotiations, makes no sense.
Read More →Log it, mine it, burn it
Another term of office of this government would see exploitation of our remaining natural resources and environmental damage on a larger scale, all in the name of short term profits for a few. There are better alternatives. We need a change of direction towards a fairer and more sustainable economy. We need a new government, with the Greens at its heart.
Read More →Trade liberalisation for the Pacific
In the wake of the collapsed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), the New Zealand government has desperately chased new trade liberalisation deals, despite calls for a re-think of trade policy and the development of fair and sustainable agreements.
Read More →New Rules on the Global Economy
The government’s attempts to revive the Trade Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) have, as predicted, failed. Instead, the government is now putting its faith in negotiating numerous Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It’s more of the same, ignoring the lessons from the TPPA debacle.
Read More →Dirty laundry
There’s a pattern. The government lets companies regulate themselves until they get exposed for causing damage to the public interest. Deny, fudge, delay, until there is enough of an outcry that it starts to be politically damaging. At that stage, the government does just enough to make the public think that the problem is sorted. But not enough to stop the companies from making big profits.
Read More →Super vs tax cuts – what’s affordable?
The super debate hasn’t been super. It has missed the most important issues. The government has tried to focus on misleading measures of financial affordability in 2040, in an attempt to position themselves as responsible. But the real issues are about fairness and equity, across and within generations.
Read More →Watch Barry Coates rip the Intelligence and Security Bill apart
Watch Barry Coates rip the Intelligence and Security Bill apart
Read More →Lock them up
The government has started the election year with a tough on crime message. More police on the beat and more prisons. The government plans to spend $1 billion on a massive prison-building programme in a country that already imprisons a greater proportion of its people than all but a few OECD countries.
Read More →Corporate Welfare – Whose rules rule?
The new data on inequality from Oxfam shows an even more obscene disparity than previous reports – 8 billionaires owning more than half the world’s population and two billionaires in New Zealand owning more than the poorest 30% of New Zealanders. This is not inevitable. It results from rules that favour the rich and penalise the poor.
Read More →Revealing the Economic Myths
The charade of this government’s sound economic management is unravelling. Misleading GDP figures, pumped up by property speculation and high immigration, have given the impression that all is well, masking our continued economic decline compared to OECD countries.
Read More →Australia’s shame
We think of human rights abuses occurring in far off places. But 4000 km to the North is a country that has been taken over as a prison. There are 1200 people held against their will. They were sent there for six months to processing their applications for refugee status. Three years later, they are trapped on Nauru in despair.
Read More →The TPPA is dead. What next?
Citizens across each of the 12 countries in the TPPA built a strong movement against the excesses of corporate rights represented by the TPPA, as we have done twice before in defeating these proposals in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (1998) and in the World Trade Organisation (1999 and 2003).
Read More →Calling time on Trojan horse treaties
If you’re concerned about the TPPA, there is even worse to come. TiSA is a new trade deal that would leave citizens powerless to set the rules about what big multinational corporations can do in our communities and workplaces.
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