The deal with Canberra would increase UK trade by as much as £16billion a year.
Trade between Britain and New Zealand is estimated to be worth nearly £3billion and will increase substantially once a deal is agreed.
Finalising the deals, as well as securing Britain s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) have all been key aims for Government in 2021.
CPTPP is a free-trade agreement between 11 countries centred around the Pacific Rim.
Liz Truss is close to finalising trade deals with Australia and New Zealand (Image: GETTY)
Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam and Japan are all members of the trade pact.
The Equalities Minister lashed out at pink bus feminism today as she claimed past Governments had focused too much on race, gender and sexuality issues at the expense of geographic inequality and class.
Liz Truss used a major speech to demand the equality debate be led by facts, not by fashion , with a swipe at identity politics and loud lobby groups .
Setting out a new Conservative values approach she dismissed quotas, targets, and unconscious bias training as tools of the Left that do nothing to fix systems .
She also confirmed that unconscious bias training would be scrapped by the Government and Civil Service.
Gender pay gap widens at department run by women and equalities minister Truss
PA
16 December 2020, 1:07 pm
The gender pay gap has significantly widened at the Department of International Trade (DIT) run by women and equalities minister Liz Truss, new figures reveal.
Labour said the growing divide “raises serious questions” about the Government’s commitment to close the gender pay gap when Ms Truss’s department was “clearly going backwards”.
The gap in the DIT, which Ms Truss took over in July last year, has widened every year since the first report in 2017, when the mean stood at 3.6%.
Under Ms Truss, the mean rose to 6.5% in 2020, while the median increased to 15.9% from 2.7% three years earlier.