McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): I like my fellow National Party MPs rise to oppose this bill but I will have some slightly different reasons for doing so. I want to firstly congratulate the member Winston Peters on getting a bill drawn out of the ballot. I have not been here—in fact I have been here for over 30 years' shorter time than him and I have not had one drawn out of the ballot yet. But anyway that is beside the point. I have some suspicion as to why he would want to design a bill like this because I am old enough to remember the days of the land court when you had to register every purchase made in New Zealand. You then had to get it through the land court and I would have to say that it caused the creation of a myriad of trusts companies and various other devious methods of obscuring the names of the people who own land from being on the title of that land. Of course Winston Peters the member who drew up this bill—I think he is trained as a lawyer. My memory of the land court days of death duties and those sorts of things is that they were just loved by the lawyers. It was a field day for them. So I guess that one of the reasons I do not support this bill is that I think it is—some of the objectives of it are fine—hugely complicated. It will be very expensive to operate on the face of it—and I have got no proof and I am sure the member has no proof of that either—and I am sure it will be administratively very difficult to manage. That is the first reason that I am opposed to the bill. The second reason is that—and I think the reasons of the previous speaker Phil Twyford for his thinking this was a great idea is very different in fact from those of the member who designed the bill. I do not think this bill is intended to ban overseas buyers from New Zealand at all; it is designed to give information around the number of overseas investors or overseas people who are buying land in New Zealand. The previous speaker also alluded to the legislation or policy in place in Australia and the UK and various other countries around the world. It has not had any positive effect on house values or any other values in those countries either so that was a spurious argument. So from the point of view of lowering costs for our people trying to get into housing markets or into farming or whatever else in fact it does not achieve that. His argument around that point was in my view quite inaccurate. We already have in New Zealand a tax regime that discourages people from short-term trading in any type of property. It is in effect I suppose a short-term capital gain. That has been in place for some time. It has been reinforced in the last 12 months and so we have a tax regime that gives us the ability to temper people's opportunity to trade property in the manner purely for capital gain in the short term. Rt Hon Winston Peters: How many years?IAN McKELVIE: Two years—Rt Hon Winston Peters: Precisely. That's no protection at all.IAN McKELVIE: Well when you are my age and your age 2 years is a long time. Ha ha! We need every bit of time we can get—we might not be around in 2 years' time. So I think that although I can understand the sentiment behind some of this type of activity I certainly do not think from New Zealand's perspective that we should be looking at banning or even making it more difficult for foreign people or people who are coming to New Zealand to invest in the New Zealand market. I do think we need to collect data. I think Land Information New Zealand is doing a very good job—a much better job—and there was some significant questioning of that in the last week or two around a lot of the stuff that goes on in respect of landownership and property ownership in New Zealand. It is also doing a very good job in respect of Overseas Investment Office and it has increased the resource going into that area and the amount of effort going into that area significantly in the last 12 months. Last week its officials appeared before the select committee and I thought we got certainly a massive improvement in the accountability in the way they were performing and that was primarily because they had been stretched for resource. That has been resolved and so we are getting a much better result in that respect. In speaking against this bill I think that there are some points in it that are worth picking up on in the future and I am sure future Governments will pick up on some of those. But in the course of that I do warn against this very complicated type of legislation because it leads to all sorts of opportunity for people to find alternative ways of owning land registering land transfers and all sorts of things. I think the simpler we keep our structure the better off we are. Thank you.