Has the Govt won over voters with it’s TPPA-11 concessions?
A new survey of mostly Labour, Greens, and NZ First voters suggests not.
Last year, only weeks after the new government roared into power with it’s bold progressive agenda, our Prime Minister and Trade Minister claimed they’d managed to make several concessions on revised text of the deeply controversial TPPA agreement.
To their credit — in a short amount of time they had managed to suspend several dangerous clauses and introduce legislation to make it harder for people not living in New Zealand to buy property in New Zealand.
Yet when we surveyed members of the ActionStation community in November they weren’t convinced and remained very concerned about what the agreement would mean for the ability of our government to make laws and regulations in the best interests of everyday people and our precious planet.
A rebrand and a couple of months of valiant government spin later and many voters still aren’t convinced it’s a good deal.
When Trade Minister, David Parker, announced he intended to sign the TPPA-11 agreement on the 8th of March and NZ First flipped by pledging their support (despite running on a platform of firm opposition to the agreement), we met with the Minister’s office to ask where the promised consultation was — where he agreed to do a facebook live with concerned members on the issue (tune in on our facebook page at 6.30pm on the 26th February), and surveyed members again.
Over 80% of the 1,160+ respondents (who mostly self identify as Labour, Greens, and NZ First voters) said the concessions achieved by the government didn’t alleviate their concerns about the agreement and wanted to keep campaigning. Only 3.6% said their major concerns had been addressed with the remaining concerned but feeling despondent about what could be done.
With so many competing priorities and plenty of positive things we could campaign on (such as strengthening the great new laws to reduce whānau poverty, or focusing on restructuring our tax system to make it fairer for everyone, or preventing international bottling companies from gobbling up pristine waterways), TPPA-11 remains a high priority for members of the ActionStation community. 74% of respondents ranked it as a high or top priority.
With virtually no robust analysis of what the new agreement would actually mean in terms of impact on our rivers, oceans and climate, ability to make laws to promote healthy lives, or on our businesses who buy and sell stuff internationally — it wasn’t surprising that the top priority for what to do next was to keep pushing the government to fund independent analysis of the agreement.
Doing so is simply the rational thing to do. For a giant agreement (it’s thousands of pages long) with such far reaching clauses into virtually every area of our lives (including what giant corporations like facebook and google to do with our personal data), it’s pretty important to know what the implications are before we sign the binding contract.
By law, the Ministry that negotiated the agreement, MFAT, is required to produce a National Impact Analysis. But when they did this for the original TPPA agreement it was widely criticised by many — especially the Labour Party, who argued there should be an independent review.
It often helps to have a second opinion. Just like if you’re buying a car the salesperson might give it a raving review and point to what others have said about it but when you ask a mechanic to take a second look you find out that the rust under the shiny bonet is going to cost you thousands in the long run making the car worthless.
The same is true for signing trade pacts. That’s why it’s crucial there’s an independent impact analysis of the agreement before it’s signed. This is something we think many New Zealanders will agree with so we’re crowdfunding polling to show this and help persuade the Minister to commission robust independent analysis of the agreement to help inform public discussion and consultation about whether or not we should sign up to it.
Chip in now so we can fund TPPA-11 polling in time for it to have an impact.
