Source: Radio New Zealand
Trade Minster Todd McClay says the government is “working through a process” with opposition parties. RNZ / Mark Papalii
The Free Trade Agreement with India is better than almost every other trade agreement with India, says the trade minister, who is optimistic it will get the political support needed to ratify it.
Todd McClay held the first of a series of roadshows on the NZ-India Free Trade agreement in Christchurch today at Business Canterbury.
New Zealand First has said it will not support the deal, but McClay said he had a constructive meeting on the FTA with Labour leader Chris Hipkins last week to work through some of the issues they had.
“The Labour party has the text already, and has had full access to officials since the end of last year, and we are working through a process.”
McClay said they had made some progress on the issues, but he expected further meetings will be needed.
He said every previous significant trade agreement had support from both major parties, because they knew how important trade was to New Zealand.
“This is a high quality agreement that is good for New Zealand. It is better than almost every other agreement India has negotiated and I want to be very clear – if it wasn’t a good agreement, we wouldn’t have agreed to it.”
Labour said last week that National must ensure stronger protections for migrant workers in the Free Trade Agreement with India, before it agreed to it.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
