Hopefully the TPPA is sinking again. The much heralded final conference has apparently been delayed by many hours.
Trade ministers and officials had set a goal to reach an agreement by today and a press conference on the decision was due to be held at 11:30am New Zealand time.
Radio New Zealand has been told by agricultural trade envoy Mike Petersen, who is at the talks representing the interests of the New Zealand primary sector, that the conference will now take place at 5:30pm.
The talks have been described as being on a knife’s edge.
Trade ministers and officials had set a goal to reach an agreement by today.
Former trade negotiator Charles Finny said it was a good sign the news conference has been put back, as it showed negotiations were still on-going, rather than having broken down.
Unfortunately that probably does mean that they think that there is a chance that this daft restraint of trade agreement may go ahead. For NZ there is no good news in it because apparently John Key has been reduced to trying to talk up its benefits for (I have been told – can’t find a link?
1. Tourism – which has virtually no barriers now and has largely constrained by our currency levels. Now that the currency has dropped relative to several other countries, I guess he is hoping for a spike.
2. Hi-tech software and manufacturing.. FFS there are no barriers for the type of tech we export. I’ve been exporting tech, both software and hardware for various companies for more than 2 decades. It is vertical market sales, and to date the number of restrictions at the border is one – exporting antennas to Saudi Arabi.
However there are some international restrictions like ITAR for a few companies in Australasia. However the US is already relaxed their rather extreme interpretations of ITAR in the interests of increasing their exports. I guess that is why John Key mentioned it. In a year or so if TPP is signed, the credit grabbing fool will want to claim credit for something that the US was already doing.
National appear to have started talking up this kind of idiotic crap as it appears increasingly unlikely we will get any improvement in agricultural access. See Fran O’Sullivan this morning “Groser should pack up and leave TPP without good dairy deal – but he probably won’t” for a good summary.
One thing that did surprise me in the NZ Herald this morning was to see that John Roughan does appear to be able to think. It sounds like his tech-head son managed to chisel some basic understanding about how the tech industry views the TPP.. “TPP a threat to knowledge and innovation”
My son who works in IT has been furious with John Key – truly scathingly furious – for pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Jared is a “solutions architect”, or was when he worked for a software firm in Auckland. A previous employer in Melbourne has recently hired him back.
He hates the prospect of the TPP with a passion because, he told me, software developers already have to waste too much time and money fighting off idle patent suits from the United States. The idea of adopting an intellectual property regime along US lines fills him with disgust.
It is the one thing that worries me in all the elements of the big trade and investment agreement said to be nearing completion at talks in Hawaii this week. Innovation is seldom easy to define. Knowledge should never be a restricted property and its applications should not be patentable, I think, unless they take the form of a specific branded product directly attributable to an investment in original research and development.
It should not be possible to be granted patents and copyright in anticipation of developments. The idea of rent-seeking speculators investing only in patent lawyers to prey on others’ investment in creative work is truly frightful. But then, so is the idea of mega uploads.
And as usual with The Herald, we have the National part embedded viewpoint from Claire Trevett “Bottom line a problem for Little in flag and TPP” which reads like transcript propaganda from National. Essentially she is arguing that Labour, an opposition party that hasn’t seen the TPP or been involved in negotiations on it since 2008, should state what they expect.
Labour has not spelled out, for example, what it considers would be “meaningful gains” for farmers or how much of an impact on Pharmac it will tolerate. What if the deal delivers meaningful gains to consumers, and to the high-tech or niche manufacturing companies Labour claims to champion but not to dairy farmers?
Ah what? Perhaps Claire should get away from the politician and MFAT bullshit for a while and go and talk to real businesses.
At best I suspect that hi-tech companies are hoping that the TPP will not screw up their existing business. The importers and distribution companies who bring those consumer goods and services in live in a country with virtually no trade barriers worth mentioning, outside of basic quarantine regulations. How is
Sure the border bullshit in the US and Japan for commodities may diminish a bit and improve meaningful gains for their consumers. But perhaps Claire might care to enlighten kiwi consumers of any possible path whereby the TPP would yield “meaningful gains to consumers”.
Claire Trevett should get her sources to outline any specific way (outside of the religious free-trade dogma they and she tend to regurgitate at will) that this could happen in NZ. I’m guessing that neither she or they can.
Disclaimer: I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of agreements to free up trade since the CER agreement with Australia was negotiated in the 1970s and signed in 1983. Unfortunately, for NZ, the details released over the last four years has led me to be consider the TTPA to be a restraint of trade for NZ.
Despite the lying of some of our right-wing trolls, Parliament won’t have the right to debate or modify this agreement before it is signed by the executive council. A select committee will be able to look at it for a few days, but can safely be ignored by the executive. Parliament may eventually over the next decade be called upon to modify a few laws.
See MFAT page “The Treaty making process in New Zealand”
I’m kind of bored with them using this as a diversion on TPP posts, so it is banned on my post. If they want to raise that, then they are welcome to use OpenMike.
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