National's trade spokesperson Todd McClay announced from the Port of Auckland that a National government would prioritise free trade agreements with seven countries and one trading bloc within five years, if the party won the 2023 election.

The target markets — Brazil, Switzerland, Argentina, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Uruguay, and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) — span four continents and range from emerging economies to established European markets. EFTA comprises Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway, giving the list eight countries in total when the bloc's members are counted individually.

The Port of Auckland backdrop was deliberate: McClay framed the announcement as a signal to the export sector that National would treat trade negotiation as an executive priority, not a second-order bureaucratic function.

Beyond the free trade agreement pipeline, McClay said National would also pursue what he described as essential supplies agreements, modelling them on a deal New Zealand struck with Singapore. Under that arrangement, Singapore guaranteed stable fuel supply to New Zealand in exchange for food access — a reciprocal security arrangement McClay cited as a template after the Strait of Hormuz closure tightened global fuel logistics. The implication is that National envisages a category of agreement that sits alongside, but is distinct from, conventional FTAs: narrower in scope, faster to conclude, and oriented around supply-chain resilience rather than broad tariff liberalisation.

The seven-deal target is ambitious by recent New Zealand standards. Completing an FTA typically takes years of negotiation even when both sides are willing — the New Zealand–EU agreement, for example, took over a decade from launch to conclusion. Committing to seven new agreements inside a single parliamentary term sets a pace that would require simultaneous negotiating tracks and a significant uplift in MFAT trade negotiation capacity.

The geographic spread reflects a few distinct strategic calculations. Brazil and Argentina are Mercosur's two largest economies; New Zealand has long sought access to South American beef and dairy markets for reciprocal liberalisation, but Mercosur's historically high external tariff wall and its own complex internal politics have made progress slow. Pursuing bilateral agreements with individual Mercosur members — rather than waiting for a bloc-to-bloc deal — would be a tactical shift. Bangladesh and Nigeria represent a bet on fast-growing lower-middle-income markets where New Zealand exporters, particularly in education services and agritech, have identified headroom. Switzerland and the EFTA group are a more straightforward proposition: wealthy, rules-based trading partners with which New Zealand has no existing preferential agreement, and where tariff and regulatory barriers on goods like lamb and dairy remain meaningful.

The announcement, according to RNZ, was made ahead of the 2023 election, positioning it as a campaign commitment rather than government policy at the time of release. Whether National, having won that election, has made progress on any of the named markets is a separate question from what was promised.

The essential supplies framing is the part of the announcement most likely to generate sustained attention inside MFAT and the business community. New Zealand's trade policy architecture has traditionally centred on comprehensive agreements. A parallel track of narrower, supply-security arrangements — explicitly modelled on the Singapore fuel-for-food deal — would represent a structural addition to the toolkit. How such agreements are classified, what parliamentary scrutiny they attract, and how they interact with existing WTO obligations are practical questions the announcement did not resolve.

McClay's five-year timeframe maps, roughly, onto a single term in government. That framing is as much political as logistical: it gives the commitment enough stretch to be credible while keeping it short enough to be held to account before the next election cycle.