New Zealand’s aluminium extruders will not get emergency protection from a surge in cheap imports, at least not yet, while the investigation that could deliver a longer lasting tariff finishes its work.
Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer said that after receiving advice about introducing provisional duties he had decided not to impose them at this stage, RNZ reported on Monday evening. The wider investigation into imports of aluminium extrusions is still running and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is expected to report to him later this month.
Extrusions are the shaped aluminium sections pushed through a die and then cut to length. They turn up in window and door frames, balustrades, shopfronts, marine fittings, signage, solar mounting and thousands of other everyday products. Most people never notice them, but they sit inside a large share of what the building industry installs.
The local industry says imports of the products have risen 38 percent in the past year at prices it cannot match. Aluminium Extruders Association chair Nick Collins told RNZ’s Checkpoint that New Zealand was out of step with comparable trading partners, which all treated their aluminium industries as strategically important.
“We are sitting there, completely open to imports,” Collins said.
He said a large proportion of the imports were arriving below the cost of the raw metal that every extruder has to buy on a global market, which in his view was not competition and not free or fair trade.
“This is not a failing industry in New Zealand, it’s not asking to be propped up, it’s asking government to act and use what is a legal safeguard that already exists in law,” Collins said.
The damage so far, he said, was showing up in hours rather than headcount. “Already our members are working fewer shifts, they haven’t laid people off because they are largely skilled people, some of whom have worked a very long time for those businesses and we will never recover the workforce if you start to cut it.”
The investigation behind all this began on 28 May, when the Government notified the World Trade Organisation’s Committee on Safeguards that it had opened a safeguard inquiry into certain aluminium extrusions. The notified scope covers alloy profiles, bars and rods made by extrusion under tariff classifications 7604.21.00 for hollow profiles and 7604.29.09 for everything else, across the 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 alloy series, finished or unfinished, in mill finish, mechanically finished, anodised, painted or otherwise coated form. Imports from Australia and Singapore are outside the inquiry because of existing free trade arrangements.
No country is named as the source of the surge, and that is the point of a safeguard. Anti-dumping duty targets a particular exporter selling below its home market price. A safeguard responds to a jump in imports from anywhere, and in exchange for that broader reach it is harder to get and shorter lived.
The law sets a clock. Under the Trade (Safeguard Measures) Act 2014, the ministry’s chief executive must make reasonable efforts to report to the Minister within 75 working days of the investigation being initiated, stretching to 85 working days where the applicant has asked for a provisional duty. Counting from 28 May, and allowing for King’s Birthday and Matariki, those two deadlines fall on 14 September and 28 September. Either way the report lands this month.
The bar for the emergency duty the extruders wanted is deliberately high. The Minister may order a provisional duty only if satisfied there are reasonable grounds to believe that delay would cause damage that would be difficult to repair and that increased imports are causing serious injury or the threat of it. Even when granted, a provisional duty can run for no more than 200 days. A full safeguard measure lasts up to four years unless it is reviewed and extended.
The full inquiry has to weigh more than the import numbers. The Act requires the chief executive to look at output, sales, market share, profits, productivity, employment and how much of the plant is actually being used, and then to consider the public interest. That test explicitly takes in the likely effect of a duty on the market and on consumers, New Zealand’s international relations and trade goals, and the strategic importance of the domestic industry. Collins is standing on that last clause.
Actions of this kind are rare here. The ministry’s published list of imported goods carrying anti-dumping or countervailing duty, last updated in May, ran to five entries. Four of them were fruit, being preserved peaches from Spain and China and canned peaches from Greece and South Africa. The fifth was aluminium zinc coated steel from Korea. For a country that talks constantly about open trade, the entire wall amounts to some tinned fruit and one grade of coated steel.
There is a Southland angle too. Altus, one of the local extruders, says on its website that all of its extruded aluminium is sourced from the New Zealand Aluminium Smelter at Tiwai Point, which runs on Manapouri power. Billet made in Southland, pressed in the upper North Island, sold into the building trade. Imported extrusions bypass the whole chain.
The awkward part for the Government is that cheap imported joinery is helping on the other side of the ledger. Building costs have kept climbing even as the market has softened, with diesel pushing construction inputs up again last month, and fabricators buying imported profiles are passing some of that saving to builders and home buyers. A duty would reverse that. It would land just as building work has started to recover and while the trades are still short of people, with apprentice numbers at a 15 year low.
That is the trade the Minister will have in front of him within weeks. Protect the skilled press and finishing jobs at the local plants, and accept slightly dearer windows in a market that is already expensive to build in. Or leave the border open, keep the input cheap, and take Collins at his word that a workforce lost this way does not come back.
What would you do if the decision were yours, protect the local presses or keep building costs down. Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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