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.
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.
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.
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.
Watch Barry Coates rip the Intelligence and Security Bill apart
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).