O'Connor Damien: Overseas Investment (Owning our Own Rural Land) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Overseas Investment (Owning our Own Rural Land) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5242. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Firstly that was an outrageous misrepresentation of a bill that is designed to offer a fair go to every New Zealander regardless of their race or background or ethnicity. Anyone in New Zealand requires some protection by a bill like this from what is a flood of potential foreign investment into this country. There could not be a more timely bill in this House—more timely than the one under urgency yesterday. Today we had an announcement of a likely $3 payout in the dairy industry. Tonight we went to a forum talking about the future of food in this country and it is all dependent on New Zealand’s ability to control its own destiny. I applaud my colleague Phil Goff who in his patriotic committed way has put into the ballot—and had it pulled out—a bill that “requires foreign investment to deliver benefits that would be over and above what a New Zealand investor would produce.” All it does is guarantee something that the National Government claimed it would put in place and has failed to do.Can I say that New Zealand is a nation built on farmers and farming families. They have worked they have innovated and they have sweated blood to build industries that are the envy of the rest of the world. The ownership of the land has been at the core of their passion and their commitment. We need to ensure that that opportunity still exists for New Zealanders into the future. Otherwise our economy is at risk.We had a Prime Minister who if you are to believe him made a quote that we do not want to become tenants in our own land—John Key himself. And then he is effectively—Hon Phil Goff: Oh that’s a racist comment.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Well we could perhaps believe that one comment. We too believe that. We too believe that we need to have a fair go for New Zealanders investing. At the moment we have got foreign investors able to access capital at half a percent or less—or hot money—who can come into this country and not face any challenge from the current Government’s Overseas Investment Office. Not one application of the 400 since this Government came into the House—not one of them—has been turned down.At the time of the Crafar farm debacle when John Key reiterated his view that we do not want to become tenants in our own land the Government said it would change the Overseas Investment Office criteria. The Government said that it had to move to protect New Zealand investors but it also said but did not tell us of course that it was going to move to protect applications for large farmsonly—large farms defined by the National Government as being 10 times that of the average New Zealand farm. The average farm is say 300 hectares. That is 3000 hectares and above that the Government would look carefully at. It is an outrageous promise not kept by the National Government and a promise that needs to be implemented to ensure that we have economic certainty into the future.Yesterday on the radio an economist Mr Geoff Simmons—I do not know him—was talking about the dairy industry dilemma at the moment. If I can quote him he said: “We will see foreign buyers come in and snap up land keeping the banks solvent and propping up the value of the land.” That is the reality that we are facing: investors throughout the world—David Bennett: No it’s not.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: —with access to cheap capital—and that member knows that the Government is going to leave the doors wide open to the purchase of that land to prop up the values and save the banks. What we say and what my colleague Mr Goff is saying in this bill is that we need proof that any of that foreign investment will deliver greater benefits than a Kiwi of any ethnicity would—in spite of the outrageous claims by the previous speaker Melissa Lee—any Kiwi investor. They do not even have to be a farmer but at least they have to be a Kiwi. Any foreign investor has to deliver additional benefits.This bill is very timely because we are facing a tsunami of investment into this country—a country with no capital gains tax with farmers who will work 26 hours a day and that is a safe place for any foreign investment. This bill gives New Zealanders a fair go and it represents everything that Labour stands for. We stand for New Zealanders first and foreign speculators second.