Industry New Zealand is the Government body charged with administering this policy (we receive its decisions on a quarterly basis). Some of it what it does sounds worthy – improving local infrastructure near major forestry plantations, for instance, to enable the timber to get to the processing plant or the port. But there is an irony in this – as Alliance Leader (remember the Alliance?) Jim campaigned very hard at the 1996 election to stop and/or reverse the National government’s sale of the massive State-owned central North Island forests. National won the election, the forests were sold, and Jim never did anything about it, certainly not when he headed the Alliance in government as Labour’s coalition partner (1999-2002). Instead he now spends taxpayers’ money on making it easier for the TNC owners of these forests (and all the other ones flogged off in the ideological madness of the 80s and 90s) to maximise their profits.

Things have moved on to a significant degree. In 2003 Industry New Zealand has got into the reprehensible practice of subsidising giant TNCs in a big way. This is American corporate welfare being introduced into New Zealand by the very same American TNCs that insist on it wherever they can get away with it. Specifically, Industry New Zealand has agreed to give EDS $1.5 million from its Industry Development Fund to help develop a call centre and an application development centre. EDS New Zealand, which sponsored the highly controversial 1997 Beyond Dependency Conference and did very nicely out of the National government’s privatisation policy, employs 2,300 people and has a revenue of more than $300 million. Most recently, its American parent made a $US1.12 billion profit on revenue of $US21.5 billion. It’s not short of a dollar, not even one and a half million of them. The deal is that if EDS fails to generate 200 jobs in three years, it gives back all the money; fewer than 320 jobs, it has to give back a proportion.

It’s not only central government that is keen to hand out public money to TNCs. Christchurch undoubtedly has the most progressive City Council in New Zealand. It has been on our side in opposing the whole gamut of free trade and investment agreements, from the MAI to GATS and the various bilateral ones with Singapore and Hong Kong. But it is also showing a disturbing tendency to not only invite TNCs into bed but to also pay for the privilege (there’s a word for that). At the start of this decade it tried hard, with various incentives, to lure Motorola to set up in Christchurch – but Western Australia offered a more attactive deal, so the TNC went there instead. However, in March 2003, the Council agreed to fund Pratt and Whitney’s Christchurch Airport jet engine testing centre to the tune of $20 million. It hopes to safeguard 300 jobs and create hundreds more.

Eyebrows were definitely raised by this deal. Pratt and Whitney is a $US28 billion American TNC. In December 2002 it announced an $80 million expansion of the centre; yet, by March 2003, Christchurch Mayor, Garry Moore, announced that the centre would close and move overseas, with all jobs lost, unless the Council put up the $20 million of ratepayers’ money. What caused this sudden and drastic turnaround in outlook for the centre? Nobody is saying. Sir Angus Tait, chairman of Tait Electronics, put it most succinctly when he said: " …One could, a little unkindly, interpret it as Air New Zealand and Pratt and Whitney putting a gun to the city’s head, saying ‘build this new building or we’ll go elsewhere’" (Press, 1/3/03). This is a disturbing precedent and one which other TNCs (and New Zealand Big Business) won’t be slow to emulate. Pay us to stay or we’ll be off to some other more attractive corner of the global economy. This has been the pattern throughout the world – as soon as the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, in the early 90s, US corporations abandoned their homeland and relocated to the cheap labour maquiladoras along the Mexican border. Mexico is now bewailing those every same TNCs relocating their factories to the even cheaper labour of China. It’s called the race to the bottom. The Third World features export processing zones, which are enclaves within their countries entirely run by the TNCs, free of unions, taxes, environmental or labour laws, and able to export profits with no restrictions. New Zealand doesn’t have any of those (although the idea was actually discussed under the 1990s National government) but corporate welfare is very much part of that same global pattern. "You want our foreign investment? OK, then you’ll have to pay us to come there. And pay again for us to stay".