Phil Goff should have been trumpeting the good news this week. Just over a year ago he concluded negotiations with China for a free trade deal.

As free trade deals go, it was a very good one. Unlike the free trade deal between Australia and the United States, this actually lowered barriers in most areas of trade.

Goff negotiated the deal with strong support from his Prime Minister, Helen Clark, but with opposition from their Foreign Minister Winston Peters. Peters not only refused to endorse the deal, he actually launched a newspaper campaign attacking it while Clark and Goff were over in China signing it.

Can you imagine what the Chinese Ministers must have thought as their diplomats briefed them on what the New Zealand Foreign Minister was doing. They would have wondered why Peters had not been executed, or at least sacked.

This week we got the annual trade statistics for China. And they were a success story on a magnitude that must have exceeded the most optimistic expectations. Exports to China increased a massive 60% from a year ago. The previous year export growth was only 11%. Thanks to Goff and Clark, New Zealand managed 60% growth in exports to China, during the worst global recession in 70 years.

Former Green MP Nandor Tanczos asked on the blogs whether imports also grew by 60%, being of the view that increased imports would be a bad thing. Sadly for opponents of free trade deals, the imports from China increased by only 15%. So what a success story for Goff – exports up 60% from China during the worst global recession in 70 years, and imports only up 15%.

Personally I would not regard it as a bad thing if imports had grown more than 15%. You can’t logically be in favour of one way trade and think we should be able to export as much as possible, but restrict what other countries can export. If imports from China are up, this means NZ consumers are getting to buy goods more cheaply, and it also continues to lift more and more Chinese out of poverty. China’s emergence as the world’s manufacturer has done more to reduce the number of global citizens in absolute poverty than 50 years of aid budgets.

So in the week we should be celebrating the success of free trade, the National-led Government bizarrely decides to continue with our current tariffs on imports, freezing them in place until 2015.

A 5% tariff on processed foods, machinery, steel and plastic continues on, as does a 10% tariff on clothing, footwear and carpets.

In a bizarre statement from Tim Groser and Simon Power, they announce the tariffs will continue, without even one word of rationale as to why. In fact the rest of their statement is about the benefits of free trade, and how they are against protectionism.

Tim Groser surely knows that even without a free trade deal, it makes economic sense to reduce tariffs. It incentivizes capital and labour to flow into industries where New Zealand has a competitive advantage. We unilaterally reduced tariffs in the 1980s,1990s and 2000s, and up until the global recession had the lowest unemployment rate in the world.

So why is a National/ACT Government failing to reduce tariffs, when even a Labour/NZ First Government managed to do so? And was this not a missed opportunity for Phil Goff? He could have brilliantly done a Clinton triangulation and claimed credit for the 60% increase in exports to China, and lambasted the Government for being protectionist. That would have caused shockwaves, and forced Tim Groser to front up and explain why he thinks a 10% tariff on footwear should continue until at least 2015.