Key and NZ Police at G20: What a contribution

While 200 New Zealand police officers are helping to repress protests outside of the G20 in Brisbane this week, John Key has been inside pushing the interests of giant multinational corporations to fast track the World Trade Organization (WTO) and eliminate “barriers to competition.”

The Police
The NZ Police deployment is the largest overseas deployment of New Zealand police ever. The G20 Summit is a meeting of the 20 richest countries where they work to secure the agenda that ensures the rich get richer still. It involves around 4000 delegates. In total, nearly 6000 Police will be involved - 4500 from Queensland, 212 from New Zealand and the rest from around Australia.

Activists in talks with police over protests at the G20 meeting this week in Brisbane were offered a visit to the police academy to see crowd control “hardware” – sound cannons to ensure demonstrators follow routes set down for them. The Brisbane community action network (Briscan) understood the invitation as a veiled threat. “We took it as them indicating that they mean business,” said Briscan organiser Greg Brown. “Come out and have a look at what we’re going to use against you if you deviate from our prescribed march routes…There’s not many ways you can take that. It was pretty audacious really of them to make that offer.”

The New Zealand police will be sworn in as members of Queensland Police for the duration of their deployment, and will use the deployment as a training exercise in protecting ‘important people.’

The big push to resuscitate the WTO
John Key, meanwhile, delivered an address at the G20 discussion on trade where he advocated that the World Trade Organization abandon its consensus model. This is a model where all of the countries have to fully agree before an agreement can come into effect. This consensus model is the only thing that has stymied the destructive agenda of unequal trade.

Key recognizes that consensus means that the rich countries can’t get everything they want if they don’t have total power to dominate (as is the case with organisations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund). Instead, he wants the WTO to allow countries that can reach consensus to be allowed to continue, leaving those who don’t agree behind.

The agenda that Key and Obama are pushing is for a destructive agenda of unequal trade backed by US corporate interest. They use the euphemisms ‘trade liberalisation’ and ‘free trade’ to cloak what is actually going on. And they have done a very good job of hoodwinking New Zealanders, and many others around the globe into believing their bullshit.

Fran O’Sullivan, arguing in the NZ Herald says that, ‘Essentially, the Prime Minister made the case that New Zealand was such a strong advocate for free trade because of its benefits to the economy.’

Their agenda has nothing to do with freedom, and it has nothing to do with bettering the lives of ordinary people. Instead, the agenda is about deregulating the economic and political arenas in order that corporations can operate with as few restrictions as possible.

The case of the Dunedin rail workshop and the bid for new train carriages is just one example. The locally based rail workshop’s bid was higher than an overseas company, so it failed. There was no accounting for the benefits of local jobs to the survival of Dunedin, or the amount of money generated in taxes. There was no consideration given to determining if the skills, knowledge and infrastructure to build and maintain railways are essential to have available locally and immediately in the age of rapid climate change and in a country that is geographically isolated. Nor was there any requirement that people doing the work in the other countries be making a fair minimum wage (indeed in this case, any minimum wage), that they have any health and safety guidelines, or that there are any environmental protections adhered to in the manufacturing process. All of these things are considered ‘barriers’ to ‘free trade.’

The reality is that the world is not some kind of ‘level playing field’ where countries and companies could compete equally if all these annoying ‘barriers’ to trade were removed. It is a grossly uneven playing field where the most powerful countries and most powerful corporations define the agenda and then implement it in the way that suits them.

And what’s more, is that even though they like to talk about eliminating ‘barriers’ to ‘free trade,’ they are really only interested in removing the barriers to accessing the resources and markets of less powerful countries – not removing the barriers in their own country.

And even if they do agree to remove barriers in their own country, they simply ignore these agreements, and ignore the rulings by the international trade courts against them when they don’t suit the multinational companies served by them, because they are the richest and most powerful countries. This is exactly what the US has been doing for the last 20 years.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade along with Trade negotiations minister Tim Groser live in a naïve dream world when it comes to free trade with the United States. The only thing that really matters to the New Zealand government in a deal is dairy. The only thing that New Zealand will never meaningfully get in a deal is dairy because of the politics of dairy in the U.S.

Fran O’Sullivan is right – free trade has been good for the economy. But it has not been good for the majority of people in New Zealand. We have traded away our environment to the ever increasing demands of more dairying including vast new irrigation projects; we have traded away our future to the intensification of dairying – New Zealand’s largest contribution to climate change; and we are trading away a decent life for everyone by committing to an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. That’s what 30 years of Rogernomics has brought us.

Let’s stop them lying. Let’s call this what it is: ‘Government deregulation of human rights, employment law, health and safety, the environment, the climate, health care, and education all for the benefit of big business.’

ENDS

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