The government is preparing to ink the free trade agreement (FTA) with India this month without the surety it has the parliamentary support needed to make the deal work on the ground later.

India's commerce and industry minster Piyush Goyal, who met trade minister Todd McClay at a conference in Cameroon on March 29, confirmed yesterday the deal will be signed in a few weeks.

"We also had meetings with Mr. Todd McClay...who will be coming to India in the fourth week of April, when we plan to sign the free trade agreement finalized with New Zealand," Goyal told journalists in New Delhi on April 3.

The news of the signing of the deal comes within days of India announcing prime minister Narendra Modi is preparing for his maiden visit to New Zealand in July.

McClay's upcoming trip to India has been in the works for a few months now. The purpose of the visit wasn't known till now. It comes at a time when the political mood over the deal domestically is still uncertain.

National's coalition partner NZ First won't be supporting deal. That means for the agreement to actually work, the Labour Party must vote in Parliament to enable legislations that will be required to give wheels to the FTA.

That's the sticking point. Chris Hipkins says he naturally leans towards upholding the long-standing political tradition of bipartisan backing for international deals. But the Labour leader wants some clarifications that he says Luxon's team has yet to address satisfactorily.

Existing rules do allow McClay to sign the agreement with India without Labour's support. But it would not be of much use because the legislative changes required to deliver the deal later will need Labour's vote in Parliament.  

Labour's trade spokesperson Damien O'Connor says his party needs to know the deal is not opening a door to some of the claims that "Winston [Peters] is wildly making about this".

In a radio interview on April 2 with O'Connor, host Mike Hosking said "you're sort of there, aren't you, really?". "This is too big a deal to cock up in the long term, isn't it?"

O'Connor reinforced Labour's "commitment to best efforts". "We need to be able to answer to the public and say this is a genuinely good deal for New Zealand. It's not the one that Labour will negotiate, but nonetheless, it's a good step
 forward."

He suggested the Labour leader may have been spooked by claims about labour and student mobility that NZ First's Winston Peters has made in rejecting support for the deal.  

"Winston set up fears and concerns and Chris has got a number of emails and letters saying, you know, we're going to flood New Zealand with migrants," O'Connor said.

"That's not reality," he pointed out. "
But we had to ask questions about the provisions in the safeguards for that. We don't want thousands of students coming in, as happened under the Key government, to shonky education courses, being exploited in the workplace."

Hipkins has suggested McClay has been too slow to respond to his queries about the deal. On the radio show, Hosking reminded O'Connor "you're a decent bloke", and that he could have got all the clarifications his leader wants while he travelled with McClay for a ministerial conference to Cameroon last month. 

"
Didn't you sort this out over a drink on the plane, for goodness sake? I mean, none of this seems to be a hurdle you can't get over." 

To which, O'Connor replied, "No, I know, that's absolutely...we hope we can get over that."

Replying to a separate query by Awaaz this week, O'Connor said it was "deeply disappointing to see Christopher Luxon play politics with our free trade agreements".

"He can’t get agreement from his own Cabinet and coalition partners. We are not at a point yet where we would support the legislation."