Carter David: Real Estate Agents Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Carter David: Real Estate Agents Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:18384] 
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
: 
 Mr Chairman I want to raise two further points to do with Part 1. The first point is in relation to clause 9 which through the select committee process in the Justice and Electoral Committee has been deleted. That was a surprising exemption clause for Landcorp Farming Ltd. I want to know what the rationale was for the Minister the Hon Clayton Cosgrove as he put this legislation together to say there should be a regime for everybody else within New Zealand but that regime should not apply to Landcorp Farming Ltd. 
As the Minister will know from his days as a humble backbencher and from sitting on the Primary Production Committee the Landcorp Farming company is actually involved in significant numbers of residential property sales particularly around the likes of Lake Taupo. It seems to me that this Minister armed with that background information should never have contemplated dealing with the cowboys and land sharks as he calls the industry and then saying one particular State-owned enterprise with which he was familiar should be exempted. So I would be very very interested in the Minister taking a call and explaining the rationale for the inclusion of clause 9 in the bill originally. I am very very pleased that the select committee saw fit to remove that clause. I guess it has done that on the basis of saying “one law for all”. If the law is good enough to apply to the industry generally it should also apply to our own State-owned enterprise Landcorp Farming Ltd. 
The second issue that I want to make sure the Minister has done his homework on is around the definition of an “agent”. Here we now have the definition of an agent meaning “a real estate agent who holds or is deemed to hold a current licence as an agent”. Does that include a cowboy? The Minister has gone out there and said all land agents are sharks and cowboys etc. and they cause carnage. And here he has a fairly defined definition of an agent which seems to me to exempt anybody whom we might possibly have classified as a rogue agent. The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand is involved in a process of licensing these people. All it wants is the ability if there is an occasion where somebody becomes a rogue agent to in fact deal with that person. It has been asking for that and for modernised powers for a long time. 
Perhaps if that definition is not suitable to define a cowboy then the Minister ought to think quite seriously about including specific definitions of a land shark and of a cowboy. I say to the Minister that despite his rather extravagant outbursts and the bullying and arrogance around this legislation he is not right to label the great majority of real estate agents as cowboys because they are not. They are not cowboys and they are not land sharks. 
The Minister at the end of my earlier contribution interjected with some derogatory remark about me being a property developer. Well if the Minister means by that that I have had considerable dealings with and sold properties through real estate agents that is true. There is nothing wrong with doing that; I had every ability to engage somebody if I wanted to. I also had the ability if I was not happy with the system to actually attempt to do it on my own without involving the services of the industry. That has always been a choice available to people. It is interesting to me to note that when most people come to sell property whether it be industrial commercial rural or residential property they do not choose that path. They make a decision to engage somebody because they think the expertise offered by that person will actually further the value of the sale that they are about to engage in. 
So if the Minister would rise to his feet and earn his keep then I would be very very grateful because I think he could help the debate by answering a few of the questions that have been raised. 
The other very interesting comment that I would like to pick up on is something that I picked up from NewsRoom dated 11 October 2008. Mr Cosgrove stated then: “Every day you wake up there is incompetence more silliness and in this case alleged fraud.” As those comments were made nearly a year ago I just wondered whether he did not have some sort of premonition of what was to happen to his own Government. I think we are very definitely talking about incompetence more silliness and in this case alleged fraud.