No advantage in flogging trade deal’s dead horse

OPINION: Forget, for a moment, the endless arguments about whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) would have been a good or a bad thing for New Zealand.

Ignore the fact that its rejection by the United States’ newly installed president reflects the fact that the final deal wasn’t nearly as good as powerful US corporate interests fought for and was proof that the US couldn’t bully its way into a better deal.

Disregard the irony that, having failed to bully its way into a better TPPA, the new US leadership is determined to bully its way into different kinds of trade deals that somehow benefit the world’s most powerful and dynamic economy to a greater extent than those it seeks to trade with.

Put aside even the inconvenient fact that TPPA broke new ground in crucial areas such as labour and environmental standards – progress that is now lost.

The fact of the matter is this: Almost nobody cares.

The TPPA was unpopular and a powerful rallying point for the current wave of Western world populism that is putting a democratically corrective spoke in the wheel of previously relentless globalisation.

In other words, outside a tiny elite of policy wonks, politicians who wasted time and effort on it, and enlightened exporters, New Zealanders are not mourning the death of this ambitious trade and investment pact.

Nor will they in the future. That’s the trouble with things that never happened – you can never know how they might have turned out. Lost opportunity is exactly that: lost.

Given all of these political realities, it’s hard to fathom why our Government would allow the political agenda in the first serious week back at work to be dominated by a zombie trade deal.

Why would Bill English, so early in the process of stamping his identity on the prime ministership, give all that air-time to reminding a large swath of the population that he supports a deal that most New Zealanders had convinced themselves was not just a bad one, but a symbol of everything they think is going wrong with the world?

At best, that attention can be attributed to a desire to make a point. The incoming administration of Donald Trump needs to hear that the US is but one voice on the global stage, and that if it takes home its bat and ball, there are still plenty of others willing to play the game. Fair enough. In particular, Trump needs to hear loud and clear that one of his first executive decisions has just handed a win to the one country he most wants to win against: China.

As that fact sinks in, the worry is that an emotionally fragile president will provoke both trade and military responses that could see tension escalate dangerously, especially in the South China Sea, where China’s territorial aggression may be more difficult to contain if the US is waging a trade war with Beijing.

So, now that that point is made, surely it’s time to put the TPPA on the back burner.

There is no domestic political advantage in being seen to flog this particular dead horse, especially now that Japan has signalled no appetite for a TPPA-withoutAmerica option.

That just leaves our new prime minister lining up with Australia’s failing leader, Malcolm Turnbull, on an initiative that’s surely done its dash.

In tactical political terms, it looks tin-eared and quixotic to continue pursuing the TPPA without hope of a result beyond new variations on existing disappointment.

Far better, surely, to concentrate instead on what other trade opportunities exist and try to learn from the mistakes that made the TPPA so unpopular in the first place. –BusinessDesk