The battle lines over free trade in New Zealand have fundamentally shifted. Where major trade pacts were once fought over labour rights and corporate sovereignty, the proposed India Free Trade Agreement is being dragged into the orbit of the culture wars.
While the union movement maintains substantial objections to the Agreement’s lack of enforceable employment standards, the loudest, most potent opposition is no longer coming from organised Labour.
Instead, it is being driven by fringe political actors and populist manoeuvres—a shift that signals a volatile new era of disruption ahead of the election campaign.
The starkest departure from the CPTPP debates of the 2010s is the emergence of a fierce backlash against pro-Māori provisions.
For the first time in New Zealand’s trade history, a boilerplate indigenous rights clause has become a political lightning rod.
At the centre of the storm is a clause reaffirming New Zealand and India’s commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has wasted no time weaponising the provision, using it to rally his base.
“There is a clause in the signed agreement that confirms New Zealand’s affirmation of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Peters told a packed rally in Whangārei.
“This is the UN agreement that created He Puapua and the promise of co-governance in New Zealand without any consultation with you,” Peters claimed, tying the international trade pact directly to domestic anxieties over co-governance.
“New Zealand First demanded in our coalition agreement that we do not recognise it as having any legal standing… So why has National and ACT, as part of the government, signed up to this?”
It is a potent line of attack that threatens to split the coalition from within.
However, Wellington lawyer and former ACT MP Stephen Franks suggests the call is coming from inside the house.
Franks points the finger not at National or ACT leadership, but at the diplomats and officials within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT)—bureaucrats who ultimately answer to Peters himself as Foreign Minister.
“I am really concerned that there are people within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who have done, again, what has often been done with international agreements; they have embarked on some sort of frolic to achieve domestic political aims that have absolutely nothing to do with free trade or reaching an agreement with India,” he told a hearing by the Foreign Affairs, Trade and Defence Select Committee ON THE Agreement at Parliament on Monday.
Franks said the inclusion of the declaration was a “disgrace”.
“What I discovered when I was an MP and sitting in your shoes, over two terms, was that one simply could not trust Foreign Affairs officials to be there without them trying to screw the scrum.”
Other noted anti-Maorification figures included our most recent Dame, Elizabeth Rata, honoured for her work in education in last week’s King’s Birthday honours.
“By the end of the 1980s, ‘indigenous’ (and ‘tangata whenua’) spread from the universities (helped by influential anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond) into retribalisation politics and commonplace parlance,” her written submission said.
“It became a truism that Māori were indigenous with economic and political rights attached to the essentialised status.”
She said this became a “truth” when New Zealand formally endorsed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2010.
The big player in the anti-Maorification movement, Hobson’s Pledge, turned up at the Committee without either its founder, Don Brash or its spokesperson and new New Zealand First candidate, Ilikei Elliot.
Instead, it was represented by lawyer Gary Judd, who has been campaigning against law schools teaching tikanga and is a frequent guest in right-wing media such as “The Platform”.
Judd had similar concerns about MFAT to those of Franks.
He singled out the National Interest Assessment that was produced by MFAT and supplied to the Committee.
“What the assessment does not tell the House is that affirming UNDRIP is in the FTA,” he said.
“UNDRIP is not even mentioned. My client discovered it.
“Nor were the elective representatives told that the direction the cabinet gave at the beginning of 2024 to halt implementation of UNDROP has been ignored.”
But if there was a procession of submitters complaining about UINDRIP, Māori submitters complained that the Free Trade Agreement offered little to Māori.
Ngā Toki Whakarururanga was created under a Treaty settlement after the CPTPP negotiations, and its role is to conduct Treaty of Waitangi assessments of Free Trade Agreements.
This was made difficult by the Indian Government refusing to release the negotiating text to Nga Toki Whakaruruanga.
Representing Nga Toki Whakaruruanga, Donna Kerridge said there was no effective recognition of the constitutional status of Te Tiriti o Waitangi or the Crown’s obligations in the Agreement’s text or protection for measures that complied with Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
“The key for Māori to exercise tanga tiritanga under this agreement will depend on various committees established under the agreement,” she said.
“It is imperative that Māori have the right representation at every level to protect our mutual long-term interest and align cultural values.
“But there is no provision for Māori involvement in those committees or their decisions.”
Māori issues were not the only ones that attracted the fringe.
Voices for Freedom, which originated in opposition to covid vaccinations, came with a number of complaints, most notably about immigration.
Its head of legal, Katie Ashby-Koppens, told the Committee that the student and worker pathways in the Agreement pointed to one direction – ongoing, permanent settlement from a single source country.
“Whether people support that outcome or oppose it is not really the point,” she said.
“The point is that New Zealanders were never asked.
“No election was fought on it.
“No public consultation was conducted on it, yet these commitments would become harder to change than ordinary immigration policy because they would sit inside an international treaty.”
On a more modest scale, Janet Dickson, the chair of the Howick Residents and Ratepayers Association, submitted against the Agreement because of its immigration provisions.
“There are big loopholes in the management of the resulting largely ungoverned numbers of Indian immigrants stepping onto these shores,” her submission said.
It was left to the Council of Trade Unions to present a traditional left-wing objection to trade agreements: that there was no provision to enforce minimum labour standards.
The CTU said it could not support the Free Trade Agreement due to a lack of enforceable labour protections.
The treaty was negotiated in secrecy, allowed insufficient time for examination, and risked undermining local exporters.
The CTU submission said Labour rights were unavailable to many workers in India.
“ In the International Trade Union Confederation’s Global Rights Index for 2024, India was among the 38 countries that received the second-lowest rating of ‘no guarantee of rights’ for workers,” the submission said.
“Although formal labour rights exist in India, in practice most workers – particularly those who work in the informal economy – have no effective access to these rights.”
The CTU said that despite this, the Agreement’s Trade and Sustainable Development Chapter used weak, non-binding language.
“Crucially, it is excluded from the Dispute Settlement Chapter, making it unenforceable,” it said.
The CTU’s opposition is important because it is likely to be endorsed by the Labour Party’s Affiliates Council, which in turn will put pressure on Labour itself to reconsider its support for the Agreement.
POLITIK understands that the Council has already raised questions about the Agreement with the Labour caucus.
All of this suggests that the Free Trade Agreement will be an election issue with shots being fired at it from both the right for its acknowledgement of UNDRIP and its immigration provisions and from the left for its failure to set any enforceable labour standards.
.
