Bruce Bisset: Zombie TPPA keeps on crawling

Bruce Bisset

As much as there are good things falling daily from the coalition table, one major issue which went mostly under the radar during the election is threatening to cut the Labour-led Government's honeymoon period to as short as short can be: the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Or should I say the so-called "zombie agreement" that is TPPA-11 - which is all parties except the US, and now nominally led by Japan.

Because in little over a week, our new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Trade and Export Growth David Parker, and their officials, will sit down at a side table at the Apec meeting in Vietnam and, potentially, agree a new 11-nation version of this "trade" deal.

One which, it now seems likely, will not adequately resolve loss-of-sovereignty concerns around investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules - rules which give corporations the ability to sue governments in secretive trade tribunals, with said governments not only bound by but unable to appeal decisions.

Note that our brave new Government is so afraid of the potential impact of these rules on their ability to legislate independently that it is openly saying it intends to move to limit foreigners buying property here ahead of any TPPA-11 sign-off, so as to circumvent the agreement's "one rule for all" approach by having an existing fall-back position in place.

In itself that tells you all you need to know about the dangers inherent in the deal.

Yet Labour seems to be signalling it will accept the ISDS rules - even though it doesn't like and would "prefer" to change them.

And while Parker and co are rightly concerned to alter provisions that would restrict the way Government quango Pharmac operates, so as to ensure the best access to medicines at the best price, they seem to have overlooked that proposed chapter 8 "conformity of standards" rules open the door to the likes of Monsanto to overturn any protections New Zealand might think to enjoy when it comes to GE.

That's a huge impact waiting to happen, especially for presumptive "pure" Hawke's Bay, because contrary to the idea there might be an out for local councils under the RMA, the TPPA specifically requires central government to ensure local government conforms to all its standards.

Which means acceptance of Australian standards, which in turn accept US standards, which broadly say that GE/GMO products are safe.

The irony of the US withdrawing from the treaty yet multi-national corporates being able to fall back on liberal - read, lax - US standards to advance their case seems to have got lost in translation.

But surely, I hear you asking, NZ First and the Greens won't agree to go ahead with something that includes such terms?

As the Greens' James Shaw said recently, "real action to protect the environment means we can't risk signing", and both parties oppose the ISDS rules.

So any proposal should be a stern first test for how well the coalition holds together.

But Labour would not be talking "deal" ahead of Apec if its partners had firmly said "no deal". Which leaves the rest of us confused as to what's really going on.

One school of thought holds that with some 50-odd changes mooted by the combined parties, the TPPA is likely dead anyway, especially given its main (American-driven) purpose was to isolate China; in which case Labour's play is all about keeping the rich elite mollified, knowing it must fail.

I hope that's the case. Because that elite are the only ones who will benefit from this crazy patched-up corporate-controlled nightmare.

New Zealand as a whole will not.

• Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.