Clinton promises to kill the TPP

  • 12/08/2016
Hillary Clinton (Getty)
Hillary Clinton (Getty)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been given the formal kiss of death this morning, with Hillary Clinton saying she won't sign up to it if she's the next US President.

"I oppose it now, I'll oppose it after the election and I'll oppose it as President," the Democratic nominee told supporters at a factory in Michigan.

It's one of the few policy positions she has in common with Republican candidate Donald Trump.

While criticising Trump's threats to tear up other trade agreements, she agreed the TPP must go.

"The answer is not to rant and rave, or cut ourselves off from the world," she told the crowd. "That would kill even more jobs. The answer is to finally make trade work for us, not against us.

"So my message to every worker in Michigan and across America is this: I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership."

The TPP was signed at Sky City in Auckland in February, amid huge protests.

Trump has repeatedly claimed a vote for Ms Clinton is a vote for the TPP.

"She supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership - not now but very soon if she wins and we can't let her win," he said earlier this week when releasing details of his own economic policy.

Ms Clinton says her jobs and tax plans will better help middle-class Americans than Trump's.

"He's offered no credible plans to address what working families are up against today," Clinton said, shortly after touring Futuramic, a hangar-like, high-tech factory in Warren, Michigan, that makes parts for the aerospace industry.

Workers' anxiety over trade deals has become a central theme in the 2016 election, and Ms Clinton rejected the portrait Trump has painted that she is only pretending not to favour the TPP, a planned deal which she had praised when she was Secretary of State in President Barack Obama's first term but has opposed as a candidate for the presidency.

Ms Clinton had also previously supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed by former US President Bill Clinton, her husband, and which Trump routinely disparages as bad for American jobs. Ms Clinton now says she would renegotiate it.

Reuters / Newshub.