Winston Peters on the TPPA and the dairy crisis

Winston Peters is the only politician who acknowleges the depth of the crisis facing the farming industry and the country as a whole.

Here he takes on William Rolleston, the right-wing (and pro-GE) president on Federated Farmers who,as he says, represents the position of government more readily than he represents the interests of his constituents

Dairy prices drop-so is the outlook grim?

Michael Parkin interviews Federated Farmers president Dr William Rolleston and also Northland MP and NZ First….

Watch the video HERE

TPP deal failed because it was about protectionism, not trade

Winston Peters

Stuff,

5 August, 2015

OPINION: Far from being "breathless children", the term Tim Groser used to disparage the concerns of New Zealanders, there is a nursery rhyme, which describes his failure as Trade Minister: The Grand old Duke of York.

Groser expensively marched the TPPA to the top of the hill, only to march it all the way back down again.

And remember how it goes: "And when they were only half-way up, they were neither up nor down."

Despite the soothing assurances since, anyone with a modicum of foreign policy nous knows the Trans-Pacific Partnership is on hold until after the November 2016 United States Presidential elections.

In the coming days and weeks, we will discover the reality that, for now, the TPPA is dead in the water.

We also have an opportunity to take stock and go to those countries who share our view that "fair trade" is not about trading away either sovereignty or exporters.

Instead of reinforcing failure, a smart trade minister would go back to the original "Pacific 4" agreement from whence the TPPA sprung.

New Zealand First voted for that agreement because it was all about trade.

In other words, New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei and Chile did not need nefarious Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions and corporate privilege to secure a highly-successful free trade agreement.

We see no reason why Australia and others will not want in on an expanded "Pacific 4".

So what of Canada, Japan and the United States?

They would become candidate countries aware that it is about trade and not "comprehensive investment outcomes".

Yet leaving the hardest trade issues to the last moment was never going to end well. John Key, Steven Joyce and Groser have achieved nothing after seven years of taxpayer-funded negotiation.

The TPP negotiations tipped over because America was unhappy over the intellectual protection of pharmaceuticals.

America also had major issues with the "risk" posed by Australia's sugar industry, while Canada wasn't prepared to budge on its heroically-subsidised dairy industry.

Meanwhile, Japan showed the same stubbornness over rice and its car industry further aggravating the Americans, who wanted to export dairy to all TPP countries without New Zealand "unfairly" getting access into the United States.

Just before it fell over, the Australian Trade Minister Andrew Robb said the deal was 98 per cent of the way there.

Yet if the TPP was instead DNA, that percentage is how similar we humans are to chimpanzees proving the last 2 per cent matters a lot.

It is also not hard to agree with the Australian Financial Review headline Protectionism wins and US leadership goes missing.

This is a gift, the AFR says, to China.

Key's foreign policy redefines running with the hares and hunting with the hounds.

While he puts our young men and women into harm's way in Iraq and holds the Western line in the United Nations, he is inching China's way.

Earlier this year, he committed $125 million towards the Chinese-led Asian Development Bank.

On the MH17 resolution, the New Zealand government and commentariat espoused faux outrage over Russia's use of the veto.

Yet there was total silence over China abstaining on the MH17 vote as there has been about the disputed Spratly Islands.

Meanwhile, our doors are wide open to a tsunami of Chinese money to buy up farms and houses.

Few will comprehend the scale until it happens, but any attempt by National to control it will fail given China has "most favoured nation status."

There is nothing as antiseptic as "I told you so" explaining New Zealand First's reluctance about the long-term implications of the China free trade agreement.

An agreement which remarkably goes well beyond trade.

Exporters, farmers and belatedly Federated Farmers, all came to realise that Groser had his pen out in Hawaii and was willing to sign them away.

The only thing stopping him was the TPP collapsing under the weight of self-interest.

The United States has always been obsessed with international investor protections, which is why these negotiations, from a US perspective, were always going to be about much more than trade.

So let's go back to basics and secure an agreement that is about both free and fair trade with like-minded countries.

An agreement that like the "Pacific 4" delivers trade benefits for this country without trading away our sovereignty to achieve it.

Winston Peters is the leader of New Zealand First, the MP for Northland and a former Treasurer and Foreign Minister of New Zealand.