Parker David: Overseas Investment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Parker David: Overseas Investment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21549] 
DAVID PARKER (Labour—Otago) 
: 
 The reason we cannot get support to pass this rather moderate provision relating to the compulsory creation of marginal strips as a precondition of the sale of rural land to foreign people is that New Zealand First and the Greens oppose it because they favour a total ban on the sale of rural land to foreigners. So it is not because they disagree with our more limited position that they oppose this provision. 
I say to the member who just spoke that Labour does oppose confiscation of property rights without compensation but the point here is what the property right is. Does a property right in rural land in New Zealand include the unrestricted right to sell to an overseas person? Is it wrong in law for the Government to say that it will not allow rural land adjacent to the foreshore a river or a lake to be sold to an overseas person unless a marginal strip is reserved? It is not. Until 1995 the Land Settlement Promotion and Land Acquisition Act made it absolutely clear that there was an almost total prohibition on the sale of rural land to foreigners—sale of land was not merely subject to a condition about marginal strips; it was totally prohibited. Against that background it is wrong to suggest that a private property right includes the unrestricted right to sell overseas. 
Mr Key is saying that the public’s right to control through the Government the sale of land to overseas persons and to control access to our waterways ought to be transferred from the public to the private. At the moment the position at law is quite clear given our history that private property rights do not include the unrestricted right to sell rural land to overseas people. The argument John Key the National Party and ACT put to the contrary is wrong in principle. 
They are asking the wrong question. They say it is wrong to confiscate a property right. We agree. But the question is what property right is being confiscated here. If a property right in rural land has not historically in New Zealand included the right to sell to overseas people giving people the right to sell to overseas people subject to a precondition of laying off a marginal strip is not confiscating anything. No one is forced to sell to an overseas person. If a person wants to have the privilege of doing so it is within the jurisdiction of this Parliament to say quite properly that as a precondition to that permission we will reserve a marginal strip. 
I make one final point. It is absolutely inconsistent to say that one can control public rights of access across the foreshore vis-à-vis Maori claims to interest in the foreshore and then within 1 year come to Parliament and say: “Notwithstanding our high and mighty principles on the foreshore we will have a different rule when it comes to New Zealanders selling to overseas people.” There is a word for that which I am not allowed to use in this Parliament. 
We cannot get those provisions through. We have other good improvements in the bill relating to controls on sales to overseas people which will go a long way to achieving a similar outcome but it is very important that the underlying principle here be unpicked a little. When people say that private property rights should not be confiscated they are right but people need to take great care in what they define as the private property right. If people do not take care they are in effect changing current baselines to privatise what are existing public rights. To do that in a world of globalisation and of concentrations of wealth in certain parts of our world is to threaten the birthrights of New Zealanders to access waterways.