What do New Zealand’s Chief Justice, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Argentina’s chief legal adviser, The Economist, Business New Zealand, and the thousands of Kiwis who have taken to the streets to protest against the TPPA have in common?
They are all ringing alarm bells over the extraordinary power that investment treaties and free trade agreements give foreign investors to sue sovereign governments in private offshore tribunals for hundreds of millions if (in the investor’s eyes) their laws, policies or court decisions might seriously hurt the corporate’s bottom line and future profits. Often the foreign firms just threaten to bring these cases to harass governments and ‘chill’ them into backing off new measures the investors don’t like.
Today New Zealand First’s Fighting Foreign Corporate Control Bill in the name of its trade spokesperson Fletcher Tabuteau has been drawn from the ballot. The bill simply says no New Zealand government can include ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlements) in a future agreement. It mirrors a similar bill the Greens pushed in the Australian Senate and which drew hundreds of submissions at the select committee. An almost identical bill was introduced in the US Senate last month.
Labour must read the tea leaves and vote to support this Bill, along with the Greens and the Maori Party. The government will then have to decide whether to block the bill going to select committee or going through the pretence of parliamentary democracy.
There is an immediate opportunity to voice support for the Bill even before it gets to select committee. The government has just signed up to the same ISDS provisions in the NZ Korea free trade agreement. Key and Groser will sign it next week in Seoul.
The text has been on the MFAT website since before Christmas, so we know what’s in there. Despite some cosmetic attempts to make the ISDS section look less risky, it is still toxic. That’s because South Korea has a free trade agreement with the US and now insists on including a similar model in all its deals – most recently in the Australia Korea FTA and now with us.
Once it is signed the Korea FTA must be tabled in Parliament and sent to the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. There will be a farcical submissions process, because the committee cannot change the deal. But it will be a great opportunity to send a clear message to the government – and to Labour – that people won’t tolerate ISDS in any more deals.
Itsourfuture.org.nz will have a splash page with information and a standard submission that people can work from.
People should to point to the growing international backlash against investor-state dispute settlement – colloquially known as ISDS – especially from countries that are being extorted through this process.
The disputes now in play include Australia and Uruguay’s tobacco control laws, Quebec’s moratorium on fracking, Germany phasing out nuclear power plants, forcing Chevron to pay for cleaning up its toxic contamination of the Amazon basin, vulture funds seeking to bankrupt Argentina (again), terminating corrupt logging contracts in Indonesia and telco contracts in India, and Canada’s courts refusing to license a pharmaceutical.
Countries like South Africa, India, Ecuador and Argentina are either exiting these agreements where they can and not signing any more, or designing totally new models. France and Germany have said they won’t agree to ISDS in the mega-deal being negotiated between the US and EU. If you want to read more, look at the UNCTAD website for the World Investment Forum last October in the session on reform of investment arbitration.
Why is this important for us now? We are really fortunate that we currently have very few of these agreements.
The TPPA would give a license to US, Japanese and Canadian investors that they don’t have now to use these powers against central and local government decisions, and even to challenge decisions of our courts. Just think if all the areas that lake effective regulation, from forestry and mining to finance and worker rights.
There is now a grand opportunity to stop this happening in the TPPA, in the Korea FTA and ever again! Write to Labour MPs asking how they are going to vote on the Bill and the Korea FTA. Have organisations you belong to make statements to support NZ First. Encourage the Greens, who support the Bill, to energise their constituencies. Write to the papers. Ring talkback. Use your imaginations. Act Now!
