Have your say
The committee is listening — until 19 July
Public submissions on the India Free Trade Agreement Legislation Amendment Bill are open to anyone — for, against, or somewhere in between. This page explains how, what a submission can achieve, and how to make yours count.
How to submit
- Go to the Parliament bills site and open the India Free Trade Agreement Legislation Amendment Bill, or start from Parliament's make a submission page.
- Click Make a submission and follow the online form — you can type directly or upload a document. There's no minimum length; a few clear paragraphs is a perfectly good submission.
- Say whether you'd like to speak to the committee (orally, usually by video link). Given the hearing dates, expect roughly 5–10 minutes if selected.
- Submissions become public documents once processed (you can request confidentiality for personal details).
What a submission can — and can't — do
A submission can —
- Propose changes to the bill itself: quota administration for apples, kiwifruit and honey, levy design, information-sharing safeguards, the Overseas Investment Act threshold.
- Ask the committee to recommend things: supplementary economic modelling, IRD analysis of the foreign-payroll tax question, implementation safeguards, or even delaying ratification.
- Put your evidence and perspective on the permanent public record — submissions are read, summarised in the committee's report, and cited for years.
A submission can't —
- Amend the treaty. The FTA text was fixed at signature; only the two governments can renegotiate it.
- Force a select committee recommendation — the government majority on the committee, and ultimately the House, decides.
- Stop ratification by itself: National, ACT and Labour support the bill, so the votes are there. But committee-stage pressure has changed implementation details of past agreements.
Making it count
- Be specific. "I oppose the FTA" is counted; "Clause X of the bill should be amended because…" gets engaged with. Cite treaty articles or bill clauses where you can — this site's agreement guide and debate pages give you the references.
- Say who you are and why it affects you. An exporter, a worker in an affected sector, a migrant, an economist, a concerned citizen — standing and experience carry weight.
- Steel-man the other side. Submissions that acknowledge trade-offs and answer the counterarguments read as credible; one-sided ones are easier to discount.
- Ask for something the committee can actually do — a bill amendment, a recommendation, further analysis (see above).
This site doesn't tell you what to submit. If you want a worked example of arguments on each side, the debate page is written to be borrowed from — by either camp.
Reading others' submissions
The committee publishes submissions on the Parliament website as it processes them. The earlier treaty examination attracted 1,780 written submissions (52 heard orally) — browsable via the examination page. Once submissions on the bill are published, we'll mirror a collection on this site's documents page for easy reading.
Corrections
Balance is the whole point of this site. If we've got a fact wrong, quoted the treaty inaccurately, or under-sold either side's best argument, we want to know. The quickest way to flag it is through the Ask a question page — start your message with "CORRECTION:" and say which page and claim you're challenging. Every question is logged and reviewed, and verified corrections get made.