Donald Rod: Overseas Investment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Donald Rod: Overseas Investment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21553] 
ROD DONALD (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 That was rather an abrupt end to that speech but it was because I think David Cunliffe the Minister in the chair had run out of anything to say. It is very hard to defend this legislation particularly because it is a con job as I said in my second reading speech. It is a con job in a number of respects and I would like to focus particularly on the purpose clause to emphasise my point. 
Clause 3 “Purpose” is very cuddly-feely. It talks about it being “a privilege for overseas persons to own or control sensitive New Zealand assets”. It then states that that privilege will be acknowledged by requiring overseas investments in those assets to meet criteria for consent and by imposing conditions on consent. Then we have to go to the small print to see that while the purpose talks about assets the only real test will apply to sensitive land. There are b-all tests on anyone buying businesses other than a good character test so there is no expectation that a business buy-up will do anything other than tell us whether the person is supposedly of good character and there have been numerous examples of business buy-ups where the foreign purchaser has not been of good character. So as I said in my second reading speech if the Government is serious about overseas persons owning or controlling our sensitive assets being a privilege then it should give some teeth to that purpose. 
It has not; therefore the Green Party will endeavour to do what the Government has failed to do and will propose some amendments to the purpose clause. We will leave what is there as it stands because it goes part-way but we believe that it needs to be strengthened by making clear that any ownership or control must be in the national interest for the long-term benefits of New Zealanders. I ask the Government whether that is too much to expect of foreign investment legislation. If the Government does not support our amendment then in effect it is saying that it is happy for foreign investment not to be in our long-term interest and not to be for the benefit of New Zealanders. That is an indictment on a Labour Government. It is what one would expect of National if that party were in Government. Of course when National was in Government it did make it very easy for foreign investors to gobble up a lot of our strategic assets particularly State-owned assets. But for Labour to make that even easier under the smokescreen of saying that it is a privilege for overseas persons to own or control our sensitive assets is an indictment. 
The Government of course is doing this because it has an agenda and the agenda is very clear. The Government would dearly love a free-trade agreement with the United States of America and we know full well that it is high on the US shopping list that any restrictions on overseas investments be reduced or eliminated. The Government has locked itself into the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and I have to ask it whether it is just a coincidence that one of the major demands from our trading partners during the current GATS round is for New Zealand to scrap the Overseas Investment Commission. Clearly the Labour Government has done the bidding of our neighbours overseas—to the disadvantage of our own citizens—because the Government is scrapping the Overseas Investment Commission and transferring it to Land Information New Zealand. It will be even easier for foreign firms and individuals to buy up our land our buildings and our businesses and Labour is therefore doing exactly what those Governments representing multinational corporations that already own a fair chunk of New Zealand want it to do. 
So our other amendments to this part will tighten up the scrutiny on foreign investors by reducing the threshold from 25 percent ownership to 10 percent ownership. That actually brings us into line with the IMF the OECD and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in using 10 percent as a criterion for the standard international definition of foreign ownership.