Protestors were ordered away from Simon Bridges’ Third Avenue office in Tauranga yesterday after attempting to “improve transparency” by washing the minster’s windows.

Show Us Your Text activists are currently using action to highlight the lack of transparency over the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations.



Show Us Your Text window washers outside Simon Bridges’ office yesterday afternoon. Photos: Tracy Hardy.

“We are here to wash Simons Bridges’ windows in an effort to improve transparency around the dodgy trade deals that are going on at the moment,” says Show Us Your Text Spokesman Deke Hobbs.

“For anybody who has done any research on the TPPA, it’s pretty hard to get an idea of what it’s all about when there is only a few people in our government who are privy to the text.”

The twelve nations negotiating the TPPA are the United States, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam.

Show Us Your Text is a campaigning organisation which is starting out with ‘low level’ civil disobedience, says Deke.

“They will probably tell us to go, and when they do, we will go,” he said before approaching the offices.

However, the civil disobedience they have planned for Wellington at the end of the month will be somewhat different.

“We are campaigning to get the text released,” he explains, “and if it’s not released by the end of the month, we are going to try and organise civil disobedience action and an organised citizens search and seizure at Parliament, where we’ll actually try and find the text.

“We are hoping to get it done without too much fuss. We are all about transparency and openness in this campaign, so we are telegraphing our punches.”

“The TPPA is not so much a trade agreement as a piece of legislation,” says Deke. “It is going to be put in place in 12 different countries around the Pacific Rim, who will be granting sweeping powers to a bunch of really, really, big corporations around the world.

“I guess the corporations have gotten sick of lobbying governments, and now they are trying to get laws put in place so they don’t have to.”

According to Deke, one of the more worrying aspects leaked about the agreement is the setting up of an international corporate court, where corporations can sue governments for loss of profits or loss of projected profits.

“Our government in the last couple of years has invited a group of oil companies to come here and do dangerous deep sea oil drilling in our waters,” he says.

“So if we were able to get a progressive government elected that didn’t think that was such a good idea, then those companies could take our government to an international court run by corporate lawyers who could potentially sue our government for billions of dollars.

“It means that the tax payer would basically have to foot the bill for these huge, huge, companies.”

Wikileaks has the text and analysis.

“All we know about it so far is what had been leaked through some whistle blowers that have put their careers on the line to make it public,” says Deke.

The TPPA is the world’s largest economic trade agreement that will, if it comes into force, encompass more than 40 per cent of the world’s GDP.

However, concerns are being expressed internationally about the leaked content and the fact that while the public of the negotiating countries are denied access to the text, the corporations and their lawyers have full access and are involved in negotiations.

Signatory countries will be required to conform their domestic laws and policies to the provisions of the Agreement.