14 January 2016.

Mr Shayne Currie, Editor,

NZ Herald,

Dear Sir,

Below is a letter to you as Editor, and sent to you on the assumption that you wrote today’s Editorial. It is not written as a ‘letter’ for the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column. However, if you decided to publish it as an open letter to the Editor, I would be more than happy. The letter reads:

The heading to your Editorial this morning (14.1.16) ‘TPP signing an honour. Let’s respect it,’ made me shudder.

Among other things, it seemed the sort of editorial a compliant Austrian editor might have written when Hitler annexed that country.

Although you talk about the concerns that many individuals and groups have had (both in NZ and in all of the relevant countries), you provide no evidence that you have personally read any of the text of the proposed agreement, and offer no evidence that shows that the dangerous requirements within the agreement have been either addressed, or alternatively are, in fact, erroneous.

 

Similarly, you seem unable to refer to any substantive research by any of your investigatory journalists who have read the text of the agreement and analysed the detailed and wide effects that TPP will have on NZ, including its remnant sovereignty, democratic institutions (including Courts, local and central government, rights of citizens) medicine, health care, procurement, freedom of speech, internet, immigration, the balance of payments into the future, and a great deal more.

Instead, we get unsubstantiated “results” of surveys of “people” who are, according to your newspaper, increasingly favouring the TPP, when in fact all they have had is stories from the government and business spin machines, reprinted in your newspaper with no analysis.

One might think that Pravda has been reborn in NZ.

I am one of those who has read, and tried to analyse some of the thousands of pages of the ‘agreement.’ It is frightening, and represents the final and surreptitious takeover of many smaller nations by the giant supra-national corporates through the various mechanisms of this ‘agreement.’

The people have been kept in the dark by the government (and generally by the press), sold out and will face a tightening net of difficulties as the agreement takes increasing effect. And major parts of the agreement are intended to be extended three to five years after the agreement comes into effect.

In my view this is a shameful piece of NZ’s history and a chronicle of deceit and irresponsibility of successive politicians and much of the media.

Let’s be clear, there is no honour in signing this agreement. We are about to become a subjugated pauper colony.