20 days to have your say on preferential trade with China

by frog

You would probably expect me to be jumping up and down about these poll figures:

Asked if they supported New Zealand signing a free trade agreement with China, 44.7 per cent of those questioned in the DigiPoll survey said they did. Just about a third – 32.4 per cent – said no, while 22.9 per cent said they did not know.

Luckily for the government, MPs are not nearly so evenly spread across the spectrum of opinions.

But I think all you can take from that poll result, given no one has seen the agreement or knows what it might do, is that a large section of New Zealanders sit somewhere on the spectrum between ambivalent, distrustful and downright appalled by the generic concept of preferential trade agreements based on their past experience of them. Oh, and there is also a large group of people who are putting the economic and social effects of preferential trade agreements to one side and making a moral judgement similar to this one by Raybon Kan:

Much the way I don’t think the North Korean government should run North Korea, I believe China shouldn’t run Tibet. Also, I don’t think the Chinese government should run Guangzhou or Beijing or Tiananmen Square. Maybe I’m just hung up on that whole voting thing…

And we know deep down why we’re being quiet. For the free trade agreement. With a country that isn’t free. For the moola.

Good grief. We close shops at Easter and prosecute the shops that open for the sake of some execution 2000 years ago. Yet, while people are being executed right now, we shut up about it because we want to open shop with China.

These are all valid emotional responses to our past experiences of trade agreements, and selective human rights stances. The real test will be over the next weeks, when we get to see when we read the text if the trade agreement is truly free and fair, or if it is about favouring large exporters in both New Zealand and China with poor environmental and labour rights records.

It appears that just 20 working days will be allowed for the public to have their say, despite the China FTA being New Zealand’s biggest and most significant bilateral deal since closer economic relations with Australia 25 years ago.

frog says

Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare by frog on Mon, March 31st, 2008   

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