New Zealand has had a breakthrough with China over product quality after a scandal involving train subways with dangerous electrical cable.
International Accreditation New Zealand Chief Executive, Llew Richards. Photo: Supplied.
China has been cracking down harder at home since fire-prone cables had to be ripped out of the city of Xian's subway lines last year.
The cable supplier had faked test reports to pass off substandard cable as good, and bribed officials, 120 of whom have been punished.
The government department in charge of the crackdown, the General Administration of Quality Supervision Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), said it now wanted to see any dodgy product-testing certificates that turned up in New Zealand.
International Accreditation New Zealand chief executive Llew Richards said AQSIQ wanted to be informed about them directly.
"So we now have a channel that we can get those certificates into China and, of course, that means the Chinese can then take action within China itself."
It was a significant move that signalled Beijing's new willingness to crack down on substandard or counterfeit products under a push from the President Xi Jinping that began last year to focus more on quality and less on price and speed, Dr Richards said.
"We are really looking forward to a higher level of product compliance from China."
Poor quality control and fake test certificates were at the heart of costly problems with 1600 tonnes of substandard steel piles on the Waikato Expressway in 2016.
Two years on, RNZ has been unable to find out who made the steel and who issued the fake test certificates for it, despite using the Official Information Act and going to the Ombudsman to try to get answers from the Transport Agency.
However, Mr Richards said the new channel to AQSIQ gave access to new powers.
"They will be able to take action on the suppliers as well, and that's the critical thing.
"We don't know who the suppliers are, often ... there's no way we could [previously] take legal challenges into China."
There is still a critical link missing in the chain: Mr Richards said that while importers of consumer products often brought test certificates to his agency for verification, the importers of critical building products by and large did not.
Of the few certificates for steel products that they had been asked to look at in the last few years, all were either fake or had other problems with them, he said.
However, more recent verifications of consumer product certificates had seen a drop in fakes, from about a third down to 15 percent.
AQSIQ also had the power to usher in changes to counterfeiting laws, Mr Richards said.
