New Zealand Not For Sale » Trans Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership

Trans-Pacific Partnership Papers Remain Secret for Four Years after Deal

Admin2 — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:53:21 +0000

“The secrecy that shrouds the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations just got even more outrageous”, said Professor Jane Kelsey, who monitors the negotiations.

The parties have apparently agreed that all documents except the final text will be kept secret for four years after the agreement comes into force or the negotiations collapse. This reverses the trend in many recent negotiations to release draft texts and related documents. The existence of agreement was only discovered through a cover note to the leaked text of the intellectual property chapter.

New Zealand is the repository for all these documents and the conduit for all requests for the release of information, including this Memorandum of Understanding.

An open letter to Prime Minister John Key and Trade Minister Tim Groser from unions, civil liberties, church, public health, development, environmental and trade justice groups has demanded the release of the secrecy document. The Green Party and Mana Movement have both endorsed the call.

The release of the secrecy memorandum was requested during the Chicago round of negotiations in early October. New Zealand lead negotiator Mark Sinclair has asked for responses from the other countries, but there is no guarantee they will agree.

The spotlight will fall on the document during the negotiating round in Lima next week, when letters from many other TPPA negotiating countries are also handed to Sinclair.

“The National-led government has already blocked our petition for a select committee hearing on the implications of this agreement for New Zealand”, said Helen Kelly, President of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions.

“We want to see the terms that the government agreed to that stop us from seeing what they have done in our name until it is too late to hold them accountable”.

“The idea that they will keep secret the rules that govern the negotiations shows how obsessive the secrecy surrounding these negotiations has become. It has to stop here”, said Professor Kelsey.

“At the heart of our democracy is our ability to scrutinise the decisions

Trade Deal Documents to be kept secret – Morning Report

New website launched to promote debate on Trans Pacific partnership negotiations

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 07:25:55 +0000

A new website, Trans-Pacific Partnership Digest, has been launched to provide a comprehensive data base of material on the negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement involving New Zealand and seven other countries (the US, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam).

The second round of negotiations will take place in San Francisco next week. The website resource is part of a larger research project to identify and critically evaluate the potential implications of the agreement. It is led by Professor Jane Kelsey and has been supported by a grant from the School of Law at the University of Auckland.

Whatever one¹s views about the TPP, there has been far too little informed public debate about the rationale, potential content and ramifications, said Professor Kelsey.

This website aims to make information and opinion from all perspectives easily accessible to politicians, journalists, academics and students, activists, community groups, the business sector and interested people generally, and to stimulate critical debate.

The Digest is located at http://p4tpp.dyndns.org/

Trans-Pacific Partnership: New Zealand jumping onto a sinking ship

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:49:14 +0000

Talks started in Melbourne today for the US, Australia, Peru and Vietnam to join an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP, currently comprising NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, known as the P4 Agreement), with November 2011, when the US hosts APEC, as the target to seal the deal. This will be used as the backdoor means to secure a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement. Already the Americans have said that they see this as more than a mere free trade deal but as a vehicle for broader Asia/Pacific economic integration, which has enormous political implications. Alarm bells should be loudly sounding.

A free trade deal with the US would be catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. CAFCA says this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with the existing P4 partners, or the more recent ones with Malaysia, the Gulf States and Hong Kong – pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.

So it’s a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).

And why would NZ want to jump onto a sinking ship? The US has big, big problems at the moment, with huge debt, record numbers of people losing their jobs and/or homes, company crashes, and a preoccupation with having to do something to fix its ramshackle social infrastructure (President Obama has postponed his Australian trip, which was to coincide with the start of these negotiations, to spend more time dealing with his campaign to reform the laughing stock that is the US health system). World trade dropped 12% in 2009, the biggest plunge since WW2, and globalisation is no longer flavour of the month – except with blinkered ideologues like Mike Moore, whom the Government has appointed as Ambassador to the US with an FTA as his self-proclaimed top priority. We’d be better off getting as far away as possible from this particular sinking ship.

A full blown US FTA will:

Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations, even though the Government has promised to further “liberalise” the Overseas Investment Act, a law which is in danger of being liberalised to death.

push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;

make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;

attack our GE controls and food labelling,

weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.

It is always presented as a means of getting NZ agricultural products into the US market. Ask Australian sugar cane growers how successful they were in getting their product into the US under the US/Australia FTA (Australia is one of the countries wishing to join the TPP, so that what they managed to protect from their FTA with the US is now also up for grabs). The Americans have a simple policy when it comes to “free trade” – do as they say, not as they do. In other words, they want the world’s markets opened up to their products, while keeping their own heavily subsidised agribusiness sector fully or heavily protected from outside competitors.

Both National and Labour myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of “free trade”. It’s actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.

This is also presented as NZ’s “reward” for being a loyal little satellite of the US, and taking a bigger role in the American war in Afghanistan. Older New Zealanders will remember the infamous “guns for butter” phrase of Sir Keith Holyoake, Prime Minister during our involvement in the Vietnam War. It means sending our soldiers to fight in US wars in order to, theoretically, gain trade access. Nothing much seems to have changed in the ensuing 40 years (except now it is “guns for milk”, as the Government’s trade policy is driven by a single minded focus on serving Fonterra’s interests). It is worth noting that the Waihopai spybase is NZ’s biggest contribution to each and any American war, much more so than any deployment of a few SAS troops to help prop up a horrendously corrupt Government of warlords and drug barons in Afghanistan.

People who kid themselves that “we” stand to gain from a Free Trade Agreement with the US would be wise to reflect on the rueful words of Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s Ambassador to the US in the runup to the 2003 US/UK invasion of Iraq. Speaking to the current public Inquiry into Britain’s part in that invasion and war: “Meyer expressed frustration that Britain was unable to gain much diplomatic leverage from its position as the US’ chief ally. Britain failed to persuade the US to liberalise trans-Atlantic air travel and, almost on the day when British commandoes joined the fighting in Afghanistan, the US imposed tariffs on imports of specialised British steel” (Press, 28/11/09). If this is the way that the US treats its “chief ally” when it comes to protecting its own trade and economic interests, how do you think little old NZ will get on?

For full details see the New Zealand Not For Sale Website www.nznotforsale.org

There you will find a wealth of information about just why this proposed Free Trade Agreement is such a bad thing.

We particularly recommend that you read Bill Rosenberg’s excellent article “Who Wins If We Get A Free Trade Deal With The US?”

Murray Horton

Secretary/Organiser

CAFCA

Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa

Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand

cafca@chch.planet.org.nz

http://www.cafca.org.nz