The TPP was front and centre of talks between Prime Minister Bill English and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo this week.

The eleven countries still signed up to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement have announced they will push ahead with the trade deal to get it across the line as quickly as possible.

The controversial trade agreement ground to a halt when US President Donald Trump was elected late last year.

He'd campaigned on pulling the United States out of the deal and it was one of the first things he did in his presidency.

GEORGE HEARD/STUFF TPP protests have been prominent in New Zealand over the last two years.

Now the remaining countries are looking to others to join the TPP while remaining hopeful the US might be incentivised to come back into the fold.

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MONIQUE FORD Labour leader Andrew Little says US President Donald Trump has made it clear he has no interest being part of the TPP and the government is "naive" to think otherwise.

Prime Minister Bill English is also using "strategic relevance" as a reason for needing the TPP more than ever before.

"It's now got a growing strategic relevance given these uncertainties around the US administration, North Korea and various tensions around South East Asia," he told TVNZ's Q+A.

That argument doesn't wash with Labour leader Andrew Little who says it's "laughable" to say the TPP is needed to strengthen relationships with countries like Japan "in the face of the likes of North Korea".

"TPPA doesn't make a blind bit of difference to any of that and I think it's totally exaggerating the significance of TPPA to suggest otherwise."

Trade Ministers from Vietnam, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore and New Zealand met in Vietnam on Sunday where they agreed to look at options to get the deal done "expeditiously".

Trade Minister Todd McClay said senior trade officials had been tasked with working out an implementation plan for TPP, which would be back on the agenda at a meeting of ministers in Vietnam in November.

But New Zealand has an election on September 23 and with both Labour and NZ First opposed to the deal as it currently stands there's no guarantees what might happen or who will be in government when the next meeting comes around.

It's coming up 15 years since the first steps towards a TPP were taken by then-Prime Minister Helen Clark and when the US withdrew the deal looked to have flopped.

However Japan has taken on a leadership role in the absence of the US and when Prime Minister Bill English visited his counterpart Shinzo Abe in Japan this week the trade deal was front and centre of their talks.

Only Japan and New Zealand have so far ratified the TPP.

In Tokyo following a meeting with Abe, English told media Abe had made it clear to him that on a reasonable timetable "you have to retain the current text".

"For those who want to see it early - as I put to him - there can't be any more changes" other than some technical changes to allow implementation without the US, English said.

"I think everyone will come to see that getting it implemented can only happen if there isn't some renegotiation," he said.

On Sunday English said the TPP needs to "move at speed".

"Well, we have a choice of unravelling the whole thing because there's bits that each country doesn't like, including New Zealand. If we go down that track, it'll never actually happen.

"This needs to move at speed, and that means being a bit pragmatic about arrangements that were negotiated in there with the US. If those arrangements stay in place, it increases the likelihood that the US would be incentivised to join it later," English told Q+A.

But Little said the whole deal looked like an "exercise in grand self delusion".

"I think it is dreadfully naive, whatever way you cut it Donald Trump won the election, he won it unequivocally on a platform that he was opposed to the TPPA, that he would get the US out of it.

"He did that very early on in his presidency. If we can't see that as a signal and understand what that means then it's a pretty sad show."

NZ First leader Winston Peters said the government was looking "desperate" four months out from an election to show some progress.

"I want to know what the details and terms are because nobody knows."