CSB - Jason Walls - Newstalk ZB’s Political Editor based in the Press Gallery

Week in politics out of the USA and NZ. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Whether it's gun boots or rugby boots.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
The Country Sport Breakfast has you covered on gold Sport,
your home of live commentary. Alrighty Jackson Wallis joins US
News stork z'b politically the morning, Jason, Good morning, what
are crazy? Forty eight hours it's been with the US
elections and basically a clean sweep by Trump.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yeah, I mean I think that towards the beginning of
the night, when we saw some of those states coming through,
everybody thought, Okay, this is looking a bit more likely
for Trump that we had thought. But having the Senate
and likely a House as well, a House of Representatives,
having all three of them is going to make getting
the Republican agenda through for the next few years a

(00:40):
lot easier than most would have anticipated. And listen, you
have the twin engines of the inflation issues and then
issues within immigrations and at the border. It kind of becomes,
in hindsight, a bit easier to see why Trump was
able to win. I actually think in my whole takeaway
from the election is that Democrats need to stop using

(01:03):
celebrities to endorse their campaign. It just looks hacky at
this stage. I mean, no one cares about usher and
coming to your campaign or these various You know they're
all Democrats, and you know that they're all millionaires, so
disconnected from reality, and they have absolutely nothing to do
with the working class of Americans. Of course, they're going
to go to somebody like Donald Trump who's rallying against

(01:25):
that sort of thing. So, I mean, I'm not sure
if the Democrat leadership are listening to your show this morning,
as they are, my advice would be to really pair
back on the celebrity endorsement.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
They've got some work to do, boy for the next
election in four years from now. Trump doesn't take over
for I think it's something like the seventy four days.
But I guess the big concern for us here in
New Zealand what does it mean for New Zealand and
for our trade?

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, well, I mean, everybody's sort of waiting to see
what that happens. The big implication would be around trade.
I mean, on a very sort of granular level New
Zealand to US exports. Trump has talked about it anything
between a ten and some people say a twenty percent
imports tariff to countries to the United States, and that
goes up to sixty percent or even higher for China,

(02:16):
So that would be a concern for anybody looking to
export to the US. But we also know that the
Trump administration they don't really like what's called a multilateral
trade agreement, that is, trade agreements that have a whole
bunch of countries involved. It's why he took the United
States out of the CPTPP when they were thinking about
going back into that in about twenty sixteen. But he

(02:38):
is more keen on just a country to country trade deal,
getting those free trade agreements across the line. And we've
been talking to Winston Peters about this one, and he
seemed to imply that when Trump was last in office
and he was in and Winston Peters was the Foreign
Affairs minister under Justin Ardern, they were actually quite close
to getting a free trade agreement across the lines. He's

(03:00):
saying that there's something that they'll be looking to do,
but he's also quite realistic that the US is quite
hard to get one of those agreements with, So we're
going to have to wait to see what actually the
policy in that he and X are. I mean, he's
you know, it's Donald Trump. He says a lot of things.
There's a lot of bluster, so but whether he actually
follows through on it is another thing.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
And he hasn't even appointed a cabinet. I mean, all
the speculation is now who is going to be trade
minister over there and all these other ministers.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Well yeah, I mean you have to look at his
cabinet and think you'd have to be kind of nuts
to go into that because in the past, you know,
he's had John Kelly, who is his chief of staff,
telling the New York Times that he pretty much meets
the definition of a fascist. You had all of his
key people leaving pretty quickly the last time he was
in office, and a lot of his staff didn't make

(03:51):
it towards to the end of his tenure. So, you know,
taking that job after seeing how badly those other people
were treated in those positions, I mean, I don't know
who would actually be up for doing that.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Back home yesterday, Labour's questioning the government's decision to bring
forward the introduction of the Treaty Principal's Bill that was
introduced yesterday, wasn't it Yes?

Speaker 1 (04:13):
So it was introduced to the House, so essentially it
means that it's available for everybody to read. So the
legislation is now up on Parliament's website and so opposition
MP is obviously not very keen on this one and
Rawdi whit Tp and Debbie Nadi were packer. The Marti
Party called Leaders tried about half a dozen times to
get the bill thrown out, with Jerry Browny raising various

(04:36):
different points of order around how it's in it incompatible
with New Zealand's or the constitutional role that the government
has between the Crown and Marty and Jerry Brownley just
had to shut down a number of times saying the
points of order weren't valid and at one point said
that they were coming close to trifling with the chair.
So the bill has been introduced. Look, it's likely to

(04:59):
have it's first reading next week. We were asking Christopher
Luxon about it earlier this week and he said that essentially, well,
these bills want their table in the House, they have
at least three sitting days before they're allowed to have
their first reading, and that means he's planning on going
to Apex next week and it sounds like he's going
to be out of the country when the first reading happens,

(05:22):
which is quite convenient for him because he doesn't want
to be anywhere near this thing. So it's going to
be a pretty a pretty dicey week. Next week, I
think there's going to be a lot of protests, a
lot of heat, a lot of anger from a lot
of people that are at this bill.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Never a dull moment, Jason, thanks for joining us, mate,
have a great weekend.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Thanks mate, you too.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
Jason Wall's news dog, zb's political editor, based in the
press Gallery. It's a court