If critics want to put people off the India FTA, they should stop making it sound so delicious.
New Zealand First tried to paint its opposition to the India free trade agreement as objective and dispassionate. “We consider the India-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement to be neither free nor fair,” said its leader Winston Peters, in a lengthy statement justifying his party’s stance.
Peters went on to raise a range of issues including our dairy sector’s access to the Indian market, while making it clear that the party values the India-New Zealand relationship. Shortly afterward, his deputy leader Shane Jones came along to make fart sounds at all that. “I don’t care how much criticism we get,” he said. “I am just never going to agree with a butter chicken tsunami coming to New Zealand.”
His comments were, in the words of Labour leader Chris Hipkins, “overt racism”. Prime minister Christopher Luxon didn’t go quite as far, preferring to simply describe them as “unacceptable”. But one of his backbenchers was a little more brave. “I feel that it is racist, this is why we want to stand by my Indian community… my migrant community,” said Mt Roskill MP Carlos Cheung.
Jones’ critics make compelling points. This isn’t the first time he has attacked the Indian community. It’s not even the first time he’s invoked butter chicken. “International education is now synonymous with butter chicken – rancid,” he said back in 2017. But if we put bigotry that debases our politics aside for one second, it’s worth noting that a butter chicken tsunami sounds absolutely scrumptious.
Just think of it: a gargantuan wave of succulent, smoky tandoori chicken cresting over the Southern Alps and spewing through the streets of Christchurch. Curry sauce flowing down Queen St in Auckland, replenishing the dried up vestiges of the Waihorotiu stream with a tasty blend of cream and tomato. Rice filling the Rangitoto crater and piling up on the central plateau like a massive blanket of snow.
We’d scoop up the curry in buckets and shovel it into our cost of living crisis-scarred bellies. For a few blessed days we’d ditch the supermarket duopoly peddling $30 mince and $20 butter and feast instead on dollops of the sauce we’d collect from our gutters and cul-de-sacs. Only Wellington would sadly miss out, thanks to the risk of E coli contamination from its rotten pipes.
Even interpreted more metaphorically, the tsunami remains a massive selling point for the FTA. Indian food is at the top of the international flavour pyramid. New Zealand is already blessed with a great range of Indian options, from high-end dining to low-cost takeaway joints, but you can never have too many curries, biryanis and samosas within a 5km radius of your house.
Other criticisms of the FTA deal feel similarly mistargeted. Jones and others have wrung their hands about the effect Indian migrants might have on our housing and infrastructure. But the Indian community contributes more than $10bn annually to our economy. Indian migrants are likely to be entrepreneurial, and make up a large proportion of the country’s small business sector. Migrants in general are less likely to claim a benefit and more likely to be employed. The evidence is that migrants are a net benefit to New Zealand’s finances and labour market, which might be useful given the economy is, to use the technical economics term, absolutely toilet.
What could be the problem? That Indian people love cricket too much? That we might actually produce a reliable top-order batsman for the Black Caps for future T20 world cups? Some in Jones’ anti-FTA brigade have fretted about cultural differences between India and New Zealand, but it’s easier to list areas in which our cultures are compatible than where we’d have friction.
Most of the most vociferous criticisms of the FTA struggle to stand up to scrutiny. Maybe that’s why, after all the bluster, opponents like Jones are reduced to gurgling about tidal waves of creamy curry. But if they really want the rest of us to join them in objecting to a deal that would likely be a net benefit to New Zealand, maybe they should stop making it sound so delicious.
