Prosser Richard: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeProsser Richard: General Debate[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9644. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): It is always a pleasure to follow such an erudite speaker as Simon Bridges the previous member. He has obviously invested a great deal of time and effort in the research and understanding of his subject and I wish him well in so far as the realising of the returns from that investment are concerned. I say “returns” because that is of course why anyone makes any investment—they expect a return from it. A good investment made wisely may return a handsome profit. Thereturns on the member’s investment may well be recognition promotion and a happier and more successful parliamentary life. I wish the member every success with that.Perhaps he could even take a few moments to enlighten the Prime Minister as to an explanation of the word “investment” because the Prime Minister does not appear to know what it actually means. It may strike some members as rather odd that I should make such a claim because as members know very well “investment” is one of the Prime Minister’s favourite words particularly when referring to his Government’s planned sell-off of New Zealand’s family silver and the actual and ongoing sell-off of our lands forests fisheries businesses and anything else that is not nailed down to foreign buyers. Investors the Prime Minister calls these buyers. They are investing in New Zealand and that we are invited to believe is a good thing. The investors to whom the Prime Minister refers are indeed wise to commit their money to the purchase of land and assets in New Zealand to the purchase of farms and forests and power stations because the returns in profits will be great indeed for them.For us however for the people of New Zealand—for the citizens and taxpayers of this country which is being invested in—the results and the returns and the profits will not be so handsome. For us this so-called investment—this foreign investment of which the Prime Minister speaks so often and so enthusiastically—in reality represents a loss. The profits taken by foreign buyers come at the expense of us the seller. This is logic. In business one person’s profit can come only from another person’s expenditure. If that expenditure was itself an investment for us the seller from which we might expect a return or if the expenditure was for a service or product not previously available that the investors’ investment had made available then this would not be such a bad thing. But when the sale of our lands forests fisheries and power stations involves no new actual investment—in other words when it involves only the transfer of ownership and the transfer of the wealth associated with that ownership—then it is to the nation’s detriment and it is not the desirable foreign investment that the Prime Minister appears to be so enamoured of.If a foreign buyer comes to New Zealand and buys 1000 acres of gorse-covered scrubland and turns it into a prime dairy farm buys shares in Fonterra and sets up home and lives here and becomes a citizen and sends his kids to the local school then that is something that increases the wealth of this country. It could rightly be called an investment which we should welcome. But when a foreign buyer snaps up 16 dairy farms from a receiver that is not an investment for anyone other than the foreign buyer. There will be no more cows than there were before. There will be no additional jobs for dairy farm workers. There will be no increase in the volume of milk produced and processed. And when the new owners build their own processing facility and ship the powder it produces directly back to China there will be a net loss of wealth from this country because that will be the milk powder that Fonterra used to process and now does not and the profits for the dairy industry that used to remain here in New Zealand will now go to China instead.When a so-called business migrant comes to Auckland from Shanghai and buys 10 houses to rent out pushing the market up and out of the reach of New Zealand families and first-home buyers that is not investment. It is transfer of ownership and that is all. There will not be 10 new houses built as a result just 10 more rent payments going offshore.When the Superannuation Fund sells New Zealand forests to the Chinese Government that is not an investment we should welcome. It is the transfer of national wealth from New Zealand to China. The Chinese Government will not plant more trees here than would be planted if the forest remained in New Zealand ownership. It will not build more sawmills or particle board mills or newsprint mills or furniture factories.There will not be more jobs for factory workers or logging truck drivers than there were before. All that will happen is that the same number of raw logs that used to be exported to China will continue to be exported to China except that because the Chinese Government now owns the entire forest New Zealand will not even gain the benefit of the value of a log which on its own is worth less than the same tree would be worth as firewood. I know this because I used to be a firewood contractor.Unlike the Prime Minister I have lived in the real world and I have had real jobs. The Prime Minister is a currency trader or he was a currency trader and he knows about making money and making a profit. If I buy 100 million—