The TPPA – Not Just A Free Trade Deal
As our new Prime Minister heads for her first APEC meeting, the talk is all about the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (the TPPA) and whether or not it can be revived, even without the participation of the United States.
Our new government seems to hope so, even though there seems little chance that Donald Trump will relent on his decision to have nothing to do with it, meaning that the main benefit we were promised – free access to the US market for our dairy products – is therefore off the agenda.
Let us be clear about one thing. Those who have hitherto opposed the TPPA have nothing against free trade as such. While the benefits of free trade are often overstated, and many economies (including, for example, post-war Japan) have seen advantage in protecting, at least for a time, their developing industries against foreign competition, it cannot be disputed that free trade is in principle to be supported.
New Zealand has at times been unduly naïve in opening up our markets to foreign competition, with the result that we have little left to offer or negotiate with when a TPPA comes along – but, as the world’s most efficient producers of dairy produce, we have much to gain if we can obtain free access to the world’s biggest markets.
The trouble with the TPPA, though, is that it is not just a free-trade arrangement. As Jacinda Ardern and her ministers have recognised, it is the extra baggage it carries that is the problem.
The deal offered by the TPPA involves much more than removing tariffs and other barriers to trade. It also requires the parties to provide within their domestic economies an unimpeded level playing-field for international corporations.
This may sound innocent enough, but what it really means is that any interference with the “free market” by national governments is outlawed. The result is that the TPPA is in reality a charter for multinationals, giving them carte blanche to do what they like and able to object to any measure that limits their operations or places them at a disadvantage.
Our economy, it is clear, exhibits a number of common practices that could fall foul of these provisions. Our use of cooperatives to market some products – dairy products or kiwifruit – could come under attack, as would our use of an agency like Pharmac to negotiate, on behalf of the whole community, prices of pharmaceuticals. Regulating the sale of certain products, such as cigarettes, would be similarly vulnerable.
The TPPA goes further. Multinationals who believe that they have been disadvantaged by government action can take our government to special tribunals – and if they can show that their profits will suffer, they can force the government to change New Zealand law to suit them, even if that means that the government must go back on promises made to voters. So much for democracy, self-government and sovereignty.
This is the notorious Investor-State Dispute Settlement procedure (ISDS) that Jacinda Ardern has signalled she will try to change before she will agree to sign up to a TPPA – but she will not find it easy to secure the change and will come under great pressure to sign up even without it.
There is of course no objection to seeking agreement on the rights and duties of foreign companies that wish to trade in our country – but that should not mean a one-way advantage for those corporations at our expense. Rather than giving rights to foreign companies far in excess of those enjoyed by our own companies, such a treaty should focus on the obligation of foreign companies to comply with our laws, and to observe the rules laid down by our own sovereign government.
If the TPPA drafters insist on the ISDS provisions, it is vital that our Prime Minister takes a stand, and refuses to sign. In doing so, she could strike a vital blow, not just for New Zealand, but for everyone. Others might then have the courage to follow suit, and that could mean the end of so-called trade deals, now and in the future, that violate the principles of democratic government by allowing multinational corporations to decide what is and is not the law of the land.
Bryan Gould
4 November 2017
Trump Versus the Establishment? Not Quite
I am always surprised that, whenever I write a piece that is critical of Donald Trump, a number of people post comments that defend him, usually along the lines of what is now described, I understand, as “whataboutism”.
Such responses make no attempt to dispute the charge sheet against Trump. The defence they try to mount is to argue that any criticism of Trump has to be offset by the comparable crimes and offences of others – usually Hillary Clinton, or Trump’s predecessors in the Oval Office.
How, they imply, can it be fair to criticise Trump when others who can be similarly criticised go unchallenged? I’m afraid that I have difficulty in understanding the logic of this position.
Even if it were the case that Trump’s manifest failings could be equated with those of others, why should that invalidate in any way the criticisms that can legitimately made about Trump? He is, after all, currently in a position (whereas others are not) where his shortcomings can matter very greatly, to both Americans and to the rest of the world.
I suspect that the “whataboutists” share a particular personality trait – that they imagine themselves to be the intellectual superiors of the general run of people, and that they are therefore able, as others are not, to swim against the tide that carries others along, and enjoy being able to demonstrate that they can do so. They alone, it seems, are able to see through the generally accepted attitudes and to make their own dispassionate assessment of the true position.
They are joined, no doubt, by those who see Trump’s defiance of the usual norms of responsible and civilised behaviour as welcome evidence that he is prepared to “take on” the establishment and to “drain the swamp”. The more extreme and outrageous his words and actions, it seems, the better the job he is doing in standing up for the ordinary American – and the criticism he attracts is merely further confirmation of this analysis.
So, let us test this out. Let us cast to one side his boorishness, his evident racism, his brutish treatment of and attitudes towards women, his willingness to bend the truth, his ignorance of the rules of the US constitution, his self-obsession, his inability to build loyalty from his own staff and colleagues, his furious intolerance of criticism – the list is a long one and could be much longer.
Let us say that each of these failings is merely evidence of his willingness to break the rules, and to defy worthless conventions designed to rein him in, all in the interests of keeping faith with his “base”, who voted him into office.
We are invited, it seems, to disregard the charges usually brought against him, and allow him to get on with what is really important. So, after we have dismissed from our minds the evidence of our own eyes and ears as to the kind of person he is, what is it that wants to “get on with” that is so important?
The evidence here is incontrovertible. His central mission is beyond doubt to bring about huge tax cuts for the very richest Americans – principally the top 1%. Such tax cuts, worth billions and billions of dollars, are to be funded by denying to millions of families access to affordable health care that would allow them to escape from the destructive vicious circle of poverty and ill-health, and ill-health and poverty.
Don’t take my word for it that this is the focal point of the Trump presidency. He repeatedly declares that those who stand in his way are frustrating his determination to cut taxes in this way – and the prospect of such cuts is the only reason his Republican colleagues in Congress maintain, in an unholy alliance, their wavering support for him.
Here, then, is not the great champion of the rights of ordinary people or the courageous opponent of the establishment and the privileged. His supporters may be prepared to forgive – even celebrate – his personal ability to pollute all he touches. But are they prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as he fractures – along religious, racial, and above all economic lines – the society he was elected to serve?
Bryan Gould
2 November 2017