Bruce Bisset: Senate delay could prove useful

200 people marched against the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) protest march in Rotorua. Photo / Ben Fraser

This week's US Senate vote against the TPPA and its trans-Atlantic counterpart the TTIP has, sadly, only stalled the process, and the corporations behind the push for mercantile rule will be licking their pet politicians into order quick smart.

In reality, it was only a vote against moving to debate "fast-track" legislation that would give the President power to agree such deals, thereby leaving the US Congress with just a simple "yes" or "no" vote to ratify and no power to amend them.

Which is still more of a say than Parliament here will get; if our involvement in the TPPA goes ahead, it will do so on the nod of Cabinet alone. Other MPs - including backbench Nats - will, like the general public, have to wait four years for the details of the agreement to be declassified.

And as alarming as it is that even elected representatives will not know what's what, as has been played up recently - although I pointed this out about three years ago - the TPPA will contain "investor-state dispute clauses" allowing corporate courts to decide suits against governments over alleged trade constraints.

In short, secret tribunals owing no allegiance to any country will have the power to say whether a country's laws suit them - and if they don't, to overturn them (or at least extract huge monetary penalties).

Little wonder there is growing disquiet even in the US at the reach of this "free trade" deal, especially when the 12-nation Pacific Rim agreement is coupled with the EU-US one; together they will lock most of the world's significant economies (with the notable exceptions of Brazil, Russia, and India) into a situation where what a corporation says, goes.

Goodbye sovereignty; hello transnationalism.

Mind you, such dispute clauses already exist in New Zealand's trade deals with China, the 10 nations of Asean, and the new agreement with South Korea, and so far I'm not aware of any major hiccups.

But perhaps the Government spending $6 million to set up a "model farm" in Saudi Arabia - allegedly to remove objections delaying a trade deal there - is a "before the fact" reflection of such clauses; if, as Saudi businessman Sheikh Hamood Al Ali Khalaf has claimed, he lost "several hundred million" over the ban on live sheep exports, then smoothing ruffled feathers in this way now may prevent a suit seeking to overturn that ban later.

Cheap at the price, then; but an example of how such disputes might arise when the law of one country "unfairly" restrains trade in another.

Yet even admitting that some nations' laws are curious and their courts shonky, there is no real need for "independent" arbiters. As Auckland law professor Jane Kelsey points out, all an investor need do is take out appropriate risk insurance.

The good news is this week's "procedural snafu" (as pro-deal US politicos are downplaying it) may act to set back the whole agenda well into 2016 and even beyond. Indeed, it's possible Trade Minister Tim Groser - an inordinately keen TPPA champion - may no longer be in government by the time negotiations are completed.

Small comfort, given Labour's Phil Goff is also keen on it. But who knows? Maybe Winston Peters and the other opposing parties will have sufficient power to stop it by then.

I hope so. I don't like the thought of some multinational corporation telling us we can't use the "clean green" slogan because those words are their intellectual property, or that we have to allow GMO crops to be freely grown here because restricting the sale of franken-seed is "unfair".

That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.