Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. Thank you Mr Chair for that clarification. But I guess it is like a lot of things in this bill: it gives the executive greater power than the power of the Parliament and I will come to talking about that in a moment in terms of the changes to the Overseas Investment Act. Before Mark Mitchell spoke it seemed obvious that the National backbenchers were stuck like limpets to their seats and really unwilling to rise and defend this bill given the huge public opposition to it and the opposition from this side of the Chamber. I think it is a bit rich now that the Minister the Hon Todd McClay is conducting a trade refresh with businesses iwi and the public because it is rather too late to be consulting about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA) and trying to restore the faith of the community in the Government's negotiations of trade agreements when we have this bill before the House and when the whole process of negotiating the TPPA has been so mired in excessive secrecy both by officials and the commercial side. The public has not been allowed to see the text until very very late in the process. It was a 6000 page text. The submitters got very little time to consider it before the date for closure of submissions. That whole process within the select committee for deliberating on the bill was truncated by about a month. We have had a very different process here in Aotearoa New Zealand than that which has existed overseas in places like Canada where there is much more extensive public consultation and public engagement on trade agreements. It is the Green Party's view that there should be a non-binding referendum on the TPP and that we should engage the public and not have the executive able to negotiate these agreements without actually having the Parliament even able to consider them and consider whether they should be signed. This bill is making changes to legislation. The Parliament has not had a chance to express itself other than by the select committee report on the actual agreement itself and to veto the executive or engage in that debate there. This is a noxious bill. As my colleague Barry Coates described the Government has gone after it because it believes that the economic benefits from it are substantial but the analysis that has been done has shown that it is within the margin of error in terms of any economic benefits within the normal flux of the economy. So it is not guaranteed to deliver the claimed benefits that the Government talks about. One of the major disadvantages of the agreement of course is the investor-State dispute settlement provisions because in this agreement supposedly about trade only six of its 27 chapters deal with tariffs. The bulk of it is actually dealing with investor rights and it is those investor rights that will fetter the ability of the Government to actually pass legislation to protect New Zealand's interests. The Government has gone into this talking about economic interests but it has been prepared to put second the ability of the Parliament to regulate and the ability of the Parliament to legislate on behalf of all New Zealanders because it is allowing through these investor-State dispute settlement provisions for private corporations to sue the Government to pre-empt a judicial process and to have huge corporations taking on our small Government. Of the hundred largest economies 50 are countries and 50 are corporations. New Zealand is 364th in that list. We are 54th amongst Governments. So when private corporations seek to sue the New Zealand Government as companies like Chevron have done when the state of Quebec decided that it did not want any more gas fracking—the oil company Chevron sued the Canadian Government for almost $400 million. Similarly in Ecuador Chevron used the investor-State dispute settlement provisions to try to get out of a previous ruling that that Government had put in place to stop Chevron polluting the Ecuadorian environment. So it is this undermining of national sovereignty the undermining of the power of Parliament that is at the heart of the Green Party's opposition to this bill. The bill will allow foreign corporations to seek compensation from the Government if they see things like mining legislation things like biodiversity standards things like controls on land use to protect water quality undermining their rights and their investment certainty. It is going to have a chilling effect potentially on the Parliament. One of the other major reasons for the Green Party's opposition is the changes in the bill around the Overseas Investment Act in Part 7. Again this is where the executive is giving itself the power to amend the threshold that triggers the Overseas Investment Office to look at private corporations seeking to purchase New Zealand companies and getting involved in the New Zealand economy. Under the TPPA there is a requirement that the Government double the threshold from $100 million in the current legislation which triggers the scrutiny of the Overseas Investment Office to $200 million but the bill in Part 7 allows the Government to pass regulations to change that investment threshold at the say-so of the executive. So that is having subsidiary secondary legislation power done through regulation rather than through primary legislation that is debated by the Parliament. That again is reducing the sovereignty of Parliament. It is reducing our ability to protect our economy against foreign investment. One of the other major weak provisions of the bill is that we cannot extend the categorisation of assets and land holdings that are subject to the Overseas Investment Act. That means that there is no ability for the Parliament to ensure that foreign speculators who are speculating in urban residential property can be controlled through a change to the Overseas Investment Act. The bill prevents that from happening. It is keeping the classes of transactions that are subject to the scrutiny of the Overseas Investment Office—it restricts those to what is already in the legislation. Again it is a chilling of Parliament's ability a restriction on our national sovereignty and a putting of the interests of foreign corporations ahead of the ability of the Parliament to act on behalf of all New Zealanders to act on behalf of our economy. It is the foreign corporates that win under this bill. It is the view of masses of New Zealanders who made submissions on the agreement that they oppose this bill. We oppose this bill. We want our Parliament to have sovereignty. We want our Parliament to be able to act on behalf of all New Zealanders to protect our environment and to protect our economy against overseas speculation and investment but this Government is set on undermining that so that foreign corporations are much more able to sue and pursue their interests. The Green Party is opposed to this bad bill.