Well, what a week. What an overwhelming response to the poll. But it ended up with a 50-50 split between the yes camp, and the no camp (and I know who both of you two are methinks).Anyhow, I'll just give my opinion now.
No.
The toss up between money and morality is such a despicable one. Do we need the extra money? No. Do the Tibetans and the Chinese people need their freedom? Yes. It's a very simple equation. And, of course, with peak oil and climate change looming we seriously need to reassess our ability to provide for ourselves (including food an clothing) as a very geographically-isolated nation. When will oil prices rise so much that it's more economical to produce clothing in NZ than important the goods from China? It's anyone's guess whether that will even happen or not, let alone when, but it reinforces the issue of sustainability needing to be the bedrock of any economic policy right now. We need to be asking the question - is this deal moving us further towards economic sustainability, or further away? Because if the answer is the latter, then we should not be going down that road. And though I cannot hope to do in depth analysis on the fair trade deal with China, I very much doubt that it is moving us any closer to being sustainable, even taking into account the "environmental" parts of the agreement (which are, in my understanding voluntary and potentially completely undermined by other parts of the deal which may prevent us from increasing our own environmental regulations).
And as for the human rights question: the argument for the deal is that staying in good relations with China is the only way that we can hope to have an impact on their human rights situation. That might be case, given that they are so much larger than us in every way, but since when has entering into a preferential trade deal been the way to keep up relations with a dictatorship? And what parts of the deal, specifically, are engineered to improve the human rights situation in China? Time and time again it is proven that you can justify anything as long as it is not directly morally repugnant on the grounds that it will help the economy. Furthermore, it is scary the types of underground ways the Chinese Government has started to infiltrate other countries in an attempt to silence its critics not only in China, but also abroad - Amnesty have uncovered some examples of these tactics (though you can search for that info yourself because I can't be bothered).
And, interestingly, a vigil outside the Chinese embassy in Fiji lead to the participants being arrested. Fijian government also snuggling up to China? Because, don't forget, we deal with the bad Governments in those two countries in completely opposite ways. One, we stand next to proudly in their country as we join our two economies in holy matrimony. The other we impose trade sanctions on and turn our backs, plug our ears and say "nanananana we're not listening".
