Future Partnership Likely

Helen Clark has fast-tracked a bilateral free trade agreement with Malaysia, which could come into effect as soon as this time next year. Malaysia’s NST: “For the trade experts, [NZ] is neither too big (which would make negotiations difficult) nor too small (which would make them redundant). More importantly for such negotiations, the two countries share a ‘complementarity’ – a polite way of saying that they don’t trade in potentially deal-breaking competing products.”