Transcript
TESS NEWTON CAIN: The position as we understand it and this is all very recent. The position is that Vanuatu will not be present in Nuku'alofa next week for the official signing but is going to re-look at the implications of the deal. Look at what the benefits and implications are for Vanuatu with a view to then making a final decision as to whether or not they will join further down the track.
DON WISEMAN: There has been opposition going back a long way particularly in Vanuatu from the churches from NGOs and from politicians on both sides of the house.
TESS NEWTON CAIN: Yes well, as you know Don, we have several sides to politics in Vanuatu it doesn't easily divide into two sides, but there has been a lot of a range of views from positives, particularly on the officials side, through an ambivalence to outright opposition but within the political groupings also, from within business, most recently the Chamber of Commerce put out a paper saying that they felt that PACER Plus would be damaging for private sector development in Vanuatu. NGOs have also voiced their concerns. So it has been quite a contentious matter for sometime however last week during the Non-State Actors Dialogue which was held in Port Vila the acting Prime Minister Ham Lini had said that all was on track for Vanuatu to sign up on the 14th of June, along with the other members who would agree to the text. So to that extent there is some surprise that the council of ministers has now decided not to sign at this point but looking at it over a broader a longer time frame it is not really very surprising.
DON WISEMAN: What specifically are the concerns?
TNC: I think their concerns are similar to other people's concerns around things like protection of domestic infant industry, loss of revenue due to removing tariffs. Some of those concerns, my colleague Matt Dornan wrote a piece recently to the East Asia Forum in which he said a lot of those concerns have been overstated and just as a lot of the supposed benefits for smaller economies like Vanuatu have been overstated. So it is a very polarising issue. There are strong views on both sides. But I think overall Vanuatu just wants to take a little bit more time to see whether this is a good deal for them. Bearing in mind that, like PNG and Fiji, they are already fully signed up members of the MSG trade agreement and they may see that is a more beneficial route for them than joining in with this other agreement.
DW: Was there a great deal of enthusiasm for this deal outside of Australia and New Zealand?
TNC: I think it is variable. I think at the officials level, so the trade officials and certainly this is the case in Vanuatu, the director of trade who has basically been at the head of the Vanuatu officials delegation, they are very keen on it. They are the ones that have done the bulk of the work in negotiating the text and getting the text down. I guess you could say that they are the ones that are most across all the implications and the nitty gritty of what the deal means, of what the different agreements mean and what the actual impacts will be. So I think there has been a lot of enthusiasm for it at that level, but beyond that, at the political level and within the wider society and largely as a result of lack of information and or lack of paying attention to the information that was being provided. I think there are significant gaps in people's understanding of what PACER Plus is and what it will mean and so as we know whenever there is that sort of vacuum of information it creates opportunities for people to foment dissent or disagreement with it.
DW: Yes I don't think there is any doubt that there has been a dearth of information about this and that people over these last couple of weeks have been surprised.
TNC: Well I don't think anybody should have been really surprised as to what the text said. It was negotiated over a very long time and we knew that labour mobility was not going to be part of the text and even if Pacific Island leaders had said previously that that is what they wanted that had been made very clear a long time. Some of the most significant aspects of the trade deal bit aren't actually very significant because all those Pacific Island countries already have tariff free access to New Zealand and Australia under SPARTECA. So that situation hasn't actually changed. On the one hand they are not getting anything different, on the other hand PACER Plus doesn't do an awful lot in dealing with the hurdles that really do exist to increase trade from the Pacific into the metropolitan neighbours. And those are things around improving the productive sectors in Pacific Island countries, improving access via bio-security and phyto-sanitation rules into either New Zealand or Australia. You know those barriers are the ones that are really holding back increasing the amount of produce and other things that the Pacific exports and PACER Plus isn't going to address those. Those will still need to be addressed through other means whether it is through the aid for trade development assistance and part of the deal or elsewhere.
DW: Alright so there were going to be 14 countries signing down to 13 now and the possibility it would seem of others joining Vanuatu?
TNC: Well I guess certainly it gives everyone a chance to stop and think and say, well, should we be doing that as well if there is something they know that we don't know. So a week is a long time in politics including regional politics so I guess we've still got to wait and see who actually does turn up in Nuku'alofa ready to sign off on the dotted line.
