TPPA backers down to five? McClay should face reality and call it quits

The latest scheme to bring the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) back from the dead is being branded the ‘TPP-5’, although only three of the five reported participants - New Zealand, Australia and Japan - have been clearly identified, according to University of Auckland law professor Jane Kelsey. The other possibilities are Singapore and Brunei Darussalam, with whom New Zealand already has multiple trade agreements.

Chief negotiators from the eleven countries met in Toronto this week to prepare a game plan for their ministers when they meet on the margins of APEC in Hanoi from 20-21 May.

Their shroud of secrecy was so tight that the Canadian media could not find out where the meeting was being held. Reports are therefore confused and confusing, and it seems they concluded without agreement.

However, the most consistent, emanating from Japan, suggest a majority of the TPPA-11 have reached the only tenable conclusion – there is no benefit to them from resurrecting a deal that was designed for and in effect by the US.

Those who remain committed to the original TPPA are down to three certainties, and possibly two more - presumably, because their governments have spent so much political capital and public funds on seven years of negotiations and have ideological reasons for trying to keep it alive.

Some ASEAN countries seem wary of the message that proceeding with the TPPA text for the sake of it would send to China, and restrict their new-found flexibility in the parallel negotiations for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) now taking place in Manila. Chile and Peru are not interested either, and Canada and Mexico are preoccupied with the pending renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

‘Worse, according to Japanese media the minority of five plans to go with the existing text, probably under a different name’, says Professor Kelsey. ‘They have to strip away the US’s annexes and schedules and bilateral side letters, and draft new provisions for entry into force. But they would keep the toxic elements on pharmaceuticals, investment, state-owned enterprises, among other policy issues, which they reluctantly agreed to because the US said they were non-negotiable red lines’.

She called for Trade Minister Todd McClay to walk away from this latest plan. ‘There is no democratic mandate to commit New Zealand to a TPPA-5 or any other rescue remedy, especially as New Zealand heads into a general election. The National government got the implementing legislation through Parliament on a single vote, against the background of unprecedented protests and a massive number of submissions opposing the original TPPA. Their main rationale – securing a free trade agreement with the US through the only possible path of a multi-country negotiations – has been stripped away.’

‘The downsides of the deal are as toxic as they always were, with no prospect they will be justified by substantive economic gains in return. Minister McClay needs to front up to New Zealanders now and tell us, including the opposition parties who may become the government in a matter of months, what he has been advised and what he plans to do in two weeks’ time in Hanoi.’

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