The failure of the TPPA was just one of many signs that this limb of the neoliberal paradigm is in crisis. 2016 saw the paralysis of the US-EU negotiation known as TTIP, well before Trump’s election. The Belgian regional parliament of Wallonia vetoed the ratification of the lesser-known Canada-EU deal (CETA), setting conditions for their approval, leading European activists to embrace the slogan: ‘we are all Wallonians’.
We will have a better idea next week when the political leaders of the TPPA countries meet on the side of the APEC leaders’ summit in Peru, one of Obama’s last appearances as president on the global stage. There will be lots of brave rhetoric, so we will have to decipher the noise from behind the scenes.
In a few hours the Key government will take the next step to railroad through the legislation to implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). There were relatively few submissions, reflecting people’s disgust with how the hearings on the agreement itself were conducted.
While attention focuses on the fate of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) many of its key elements have been flipped…
Politically, the champions of neoliberal globalisation are under siege, not always in ways we would welcome. This is evident in the US presidential contest, the vote for Brexit and the re-election of Jeremy Corban as Labour leader, but also in the rise of racism and fascism in other parts of Europe, including in the imminent Austrian re-election, and the support for Donald Trump.
Rallies for Democracy that will be held around this country on Saturday 10th September, which link the TPPA to climate action, te Tiriti o Waitangi, social justice and workers’ rights, are the latest manifestation of that disquiet.
The era of neoliberal globalisation is ending. People – who are also voters – have had enough of governments that work for the rich. Precarious jobs, stagnant incomes, unaffordable housing, massive household debt, stripped out safety nets, elected governments that are arrogant and unaccountable, opposition parties who are captives of their past or too cowed by fears of a collapse in business confidence to embrace demands for real change.
Brexit has shone daylight on a crisis that’s been brewing for several decades. The utopian proclamation by Francis Fukuyama about the ‘end of history’, in the heyday of globalisation, has succumbed to the reality that paradigms come and go.
If you were breathing a sigh of relief that the TPPA may fall to the vagaries of US politics – perhaps the only good thing to come out of either a Clinton or Trump win, if they actually do as they say – I have bad news.
As I have pointed out over many years, the Waitangi Tribunal itself is an agency of the Crown as part of the judicial system. Members are appointed by the government. In this Tribunal they included three Pakeha men – a Maori land court judge, a former National Party cabinet minister, and a special counsel to a major law firm – along with a kaumatua of great mana, but who is not a lawyer, and a younger Maori woman with experience in the commercial world.