A nice analysis of a so-so trade deal.
What always fascinates me is a failure of the renegade left to use quite legitimate arguments against preferential trading agreements such as trade diversion and the spaghetti bowl effect.
Those reservations come into play before you consider the dubious inclusion of environmental and social clauses and intellectual property into such agreements. Investment protection treaties should be separately negotiated.
As a social conservative, I’m instinctively queasy about an international treaty being signed in a casino complex. As an economic liberal, I’m almost equally queasy about a major economic treaty, claimed to improve standards of economic policymaking etc, being signed in the flagship building of a company for whom our government not long ago did a constitutionally questionable private deal.
But, of course, the real issues about TPP have nothing to do with the specific place where the agreement will be signed. What is in the 6000 pages agreement is what matters.
New Zealand – like other countries – would, of course, benefit from free trade. That is now pretty widely accepted, but for a long time it wasn’t. Oddly, Andrew Little claims that Labour has been a party of free trade since it first formed a government in 1935. He seems to have forgotten the whole panoply of controls on…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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