Cunliffe David: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10701. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): In speaking to this section of the annual review debate the Primary Sector it is a good opportunity just to acknowledge on behalf of the Labour Party all of the hard-working men and women of our primary sector—our farmers who get up early every morning and go and milk the cows till the fields and provide the backbone of the New Zealand economy. So we want to acknowledge them.The Minister for Primary Industries has talked about water management. I want to talk a little bit about water management too. I am not going to talk about the white elephant that is the Ruataniwha Dam which the Government cannot make pay nor am I going to talk about the white elephant that is brewing in Ashburton where the Ashburton District Council is doing a sweet deal by the sound of it for somebody while bearing the risk of having an aquifer that might go bad. I am going to talk about a river that I am rather fond of: the Manganui River in North Taranaki. When I was a kid I used to fish for trout in the Awakino which is right next door.The Government has approved the sale of 1300 hectares of iconic land on the side of the Manganui River to a Panamanian-registered company called Ceol and Muir. That has come to New Zealanders’ attention by a thing called the Panama Papers. That sale was approved by a Government agency under Minister Louise Upston called the Overseas Investment Office. You might call it the “Overseas Investment Optimists” because this is the kind of office you have when you do not really have an office. That office accepts the word of foreign investors that they are of “good character” and it does it through a thing called a statutory declaration.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are on the Primary Sector debate and I would ask the member to come back to it—the primary industries; the primary sector. This is what it is about.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am advised by our whips that you are taking as is the agreement of the Committee a broad-ranging approach to this. We are clustering related groups of portfolios—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are clustering them. This is to do with the Primary Sector. [Interruption] When I am on my feet the member will sit. You must relate whatever you are saying back to the Primary Sector. I have not yet heard one word on the Primary Sector in the time you have taken.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: The primary sector requires good land and water management. The Manganui River borders the Onetai Station in North Taranaki in the primary sector. It was purchased by Rafael and Federico Grozovsky—two gentlemen from Argentina and Italy who have criminal convictions for toxic waste pollution in the Luján River in Argentina. But the Overseas Investment Office thought that was no threat to our primary sector. It was happy to tick off the sale of iconic primary sector land bordering the Manganui River to a group of people who have criminal prosecutions and who have been held criminally responsible for toxic waste pollution—really bad pollution carcinogenic pollution that made people seriously ill for which they were criminally responsible.But our Overseas Investment Office did not protect our primary sector did not protect our land and did not protect our awa the Manganui River from this purchase because it did not even check the bona fides of the investors. In fact it may be that the particular people it thought were the ultimate shareholders of the purchase of this land in the primary sector were not in fact totally the shareholders at all and it has said it cannot tell. Furthermore we now have information sourced from the UK Companies House and from a Florida court that shows that one of the directors of this company that purchased this land in our primary sector was tied up through another Panamanian company with a large-scale scandal involving the possible non-payment of tax in relation to the football sector in Europe to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Back to the Primary Sector.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: My point is that the supposed watchdog of the sale of iconic New Zealand primary sector land is not doing its job. It is taking an investor’s word for it and it cannot even by its own admission do a simple Google search to find out whether somebody is who and what they say they are. It cannot do a Google search. The proof of that is that the office has announced today a review finally—what Labour has been calling for for weeks now; an independent review—and has said itself that amongst the things it wants to find out is how to use Google. It is unbelievable. This is the Government agency presiding over the sale of thousands and thousands of hectares of New Zealand land. In fact it has turned down only one sale in the last 5 years. It has approved 99.85 percent of farmland sales. The only one it turned down was Lochinver Station and that was after weeks of public attention and ministerial intervention.