Williamson Maurice: Urgent Debates — Overseas Investment Rules—Sale of Crafar Farms 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Urgent Debates — Overseas Investment Rules—Sale of Crafar Farms 
[Sitting date: 14 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4317. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Land Information) 
: 
 Having the Labour Party calling for a snap debate on the sale of land to foreigners is really like a turkey calling for an early Christmas. It is just like mother’s milk for the National Party because frankly we on this side of the House should be ashamed of our performance relative to Labour’s. During its time in office when David Parker who has just spoken was the Minister for Land Information over 9 long years that party approved the sale of 665000 hectares of land to foreigners—665000 hectares of land to foreigners. Yet somehow the National Government which has been in power for 3¾ years and has approved just on 100000 hectares—that is one-sixth; actually it is more like about a seventh of what Labour did when it was in office—is all wrong evil disgraceful and just outrageous. 
How many New Zealanders remember Shania Twain buying the South Island high country estate? Right. How many people remember the then Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark walking the track of the land with Shania Twain and welcoming the purchase? Right. Let us get some things into perspective here. The total Crafar farmland area was 7000 hectares. If anyone wants to get that into perspective it is about the size of a playing card on Eden Park as a percentage of total New Zealand land. So when you sit up in your stand in Eden Park watching the All Blacks play and you see a little white dot somewhere down on the field and you zoom right in on to it and you find it is the Queen of Hearts that is the equivalent piece of Crafar farmland relative to total land mass. Shania’s Twain’s land was 53000 hectares—53000 hectares was sold to Shania Twain. Was she a foreigner? Oh well she is from Canada. She now lives in Switzerland I think. She split the farm up with her ex-husband and he now takes control of it or whatever. But Helen Clark walked the track was absolutely proud of the Labour Government having sold this off to Shania Twain and there were so many other sales of land that occurred under that party’s administration. 
Now it comes time to look at the process. The process was put in place not by the National Government but by the Labour Government. As the Minister for Land Information I have to work under an Act called the Overseas Investment Act which was passed in 2005 by the Labour Government. I am bound to act under that Act. I know that David Parker wants Ministers to break the law but I have got some news for him. The advice is that if you do not act accordingly under the Act and the instructions that the Act and the regulations give you you are subject to judicial review and a buyer could easily say: “Well I think the Minister has breached the intents of the Act and the regulations.” take us to judicial review and the courts could easily find that Ministers have acted outside of it. 
 David Parker is wrong on a number of counts. First of all he said that we only rubber stamp the advice we get. Well let me give the member a good example. Officials recommended that the Government say yes to Kim Dotcom’s buying of the Coatesville mansion. That is the official advice that Ministers received but we declined it. In a number of cases when we did not think they were valid buyers of that land such as Natural Dairy when it was wanting to buy it—that is the consortium headed up by May Wang—we declined it. We said no. But when my officials brought to me the advice about the Shanghai Pengxin bid it is just impossible to go down the list of the criteria and not be impressed. First of all what an incredibly successful company and companies Shanghai Pengxin is and has run. What a number of various industries including retail construction and agribusinesses that company has run. When I hear people like Winston Peters saying: “Oh well Shanghai Pengxin doesn’t have any experience of dairy farming.” well let us have a look at it. Allan Crafar did and how did he go running the place? OK. He knew how to milk a cow. Was it a successful operation? I am not so sure. I agree that the principal owner of Shanghai Pengxin may not have put on the cups—washed down the udders and put on the cups. I agree with that. But he has proven that he has a very successful track record in agribusiness along with a number of others. 
Then there was the good-character test. In many cases it is quite easy: you have someone who has a bit of a dodgy background or who has convictions or whatever. This was a clean slate—a clean slate for a good-character test. So you could not do it on that. Then we get to the economic acumen. In the past and I want members to really focus on this Ministers since the Act was put in place have always used the “before and after” test—that is what would be the value of this asset before the investment was made and what will be the value of this asset after? That is the test that David Parker used over and over again because I have checked with the officials who were the same officials who worked under Labour. We always use the “before and after” test. But somehow a High Court judge told us we were wrong. Justice Forrest Miller said: “No. Ministers have misdirected themselves and should not use a ‘before and after’ test. They should use a ‘with and without’ test.” They should ask what is the value of the asset with this investment and what would be the value of this asset without the investment being made?”. It is quite difficult to do because the “without” is billions of combinatorics. Who knows what would happen to the asset without the investment? Who knows? It could be the best dairy farmer the world has ever seen who buys it and it might be the most flourishing set of farms ever or it might be another Allan Crafar who buys it or anything in between. But we took the advice of the High Court. We went back and we applied the “with and without” test. After being challenged again in the Court of Appeal I am delighted to say the Court of Appeal found in favour that Ministers had acted properly and had approved the sale under the Act. 
Let us get it quite clear. This Act was put in place by Labour so you cannot start blaming the National Government for the Act and indeed you cannot even blame the National Government for the regulations in place because National added some more. We did not delete any; we left all the regulations that are under the Overseas Investment Act in place and added two new ones after we did a review. One was an economic interest test—factors allowing Ministers to consider whether New Zealand’s economic interests are adequately safeguarded and promoted. That was the first extra test we added. A second one was a new mitigating factor that enables the Minister to consider whether an overseas investment provides opportunities for New Zealand oversight or involvement. Well this one does. This is going to be a joint partnership with Landcorp. Landcorp is going to have a lot of its expertise involved in that. 
Now I get to the point that I find really laughable. We are supposedly now selling off all our country. You listen to Russel Norman from the Greens who himself has come here only recently from Australia so I find it a bit rich that he is saying we do not want foreigners to take over our land. But you listen to Russel Norman and you would think that the vast bulk of this country now lies in the hands of foreigners. I can do nothing but thank the  
Sunday Star-Times  
because it did a fantastic big exposé of this a couple of weeks ago in July in which it showed a huge piece of the pie. It asked how much land foreigners are gobbling up. Most people say that it is most of our country. We are becoming tenants in our own land. It is all going. 
Hon Phil Goff 
: That was the Prime Minister who said that. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No the Prime Minister said he did not want to be a tenant in his own land so let us get the facts right. All that the Terralink International database got used for was to show that of the total farmland the total rural land in this country 1.5 percent is owned by foreigners. By the way what is really interesting if you follow this is that in many cases what was a foreigner turns into being a New Zealander because a lot of people who buy the land as foreigners then take out citizenship. I have got a number of examples who are now New Zealand citizens as I presume Russel Norman is because he is able to stand for Parliament. Therefore he could have bought something as an Australian but now he has become a New Zealand citizen. I have seen that as well. So I would really like to know what the definition of a foreigner is. It may be someone who came from overseas but now holds citizenship. But I repeat for anybody who wants to look at that article—it is a very good article showing both the North Island and the South Island graphically—that 1.5 percent of all rural farmland in this country is owned by foreigners. 
Let us go back and get a recap because again I cannot believe Labour called for a snap debate on this. 
Hon Phil Goff 
: I think you’ve made your point. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Well no I have not made the point enough. I want to make it more times than once—I really do. I know that Labour thinks I made the point. There were 665000 hectares of land sold under Labour. Remember Crafar’s was 6000 hectares so it is about 1/100th of what Labour approved for sale. There you go. There is a good number. The total 16 Crafar farms added together come to 1/100th of the land area that Labour approved for sale to foreigners. Boy does that put it in perspective. I think that really puts it in perspective. It is no wonder that Labour does not want us to carry on. I think we should move an extension of time in this debate because we are loving it. We are loving having a debate on the sale of land to foreigners. 
I know what Labour members are going to do—I know exactly what they are going to do. They are going to do what they did with the sale of assets. They are going to say: “Oh we got that wrong. We got that wrong. You know we sold Telecom and we sold a whole lot of assets but we were wrong.” Now I hear today about Housing New Zealand Corporation: “You haven’t done any maintenance on this and you haven’t done any on that.” Then Phil Heatley the Minister of Housing got up and said: “This is how much maintenance we’ve actually done and compared with you it’s huge.” Then Labour members go: “Oh we got that wrong as well.” You start wondering how many times can Labour actually run the line that it got it wrong until New Zealanders say: “What did you ever get right—what did you ever get right?” because again on foreign ownership Labour says it got it wrong. It should not have sold all that land. It should not have sold that land to Shania Twain. I notice Labour members never said a mutter not a murmur not a whisper when James Cameron came in to buy some land in the Wairarapa recently. Oh he is a good guy actually this James Cameron. He is a Canadian. He is not a foreigner. He is a Canadian. Not a mutter not a murmur not a whisper about James Cameron—oh no. The Swiss the German the British the French and even the Australian buyers have come in here without a mutter not a murmur not a whisper. I say to my colleague Raymond Huo who I think is the shadow for me in this portfolio that he needs to speak up. He needs to speak up a little bit about how poor this decision— 
Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: I didn’t think he was still in Parliament. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No he is. He is still in Parliament. That is him over there. He is my opponent I believe in the land portfolio. He is the land information spokesman. I think I might have got this wrong. I think I might have got this one wrong. But I did not hear a mutter or a murmur or a whisper from him about his own ethnic community because we need foreign investment in this country. New Zealand cannot function without foreign investment. 
There was a very very good article in the  
New Zealand Herald  
of about 2 years ago that was written by Gareth Morgan and I think it should be compulsory reading for all New Zealanders because it said that while we continue to spend more money overseas than we earn and foreigners are left with a surplus of that transaction in their hands there are only two things they can do with that surplus. They can dump that money on the junk bond market and send our dollar to 1c or they can do what just about anybody in this room would do. They would buy an asset with it. As Gareth Morgan said those people in this House today—and I think all those people in the country—who are opposed to foreign investment should tell us how on earth you have got a plan for New Zealand to stop spending more than it earns because I do not envisage that happening in my lifetime. I do not envisage it happening in a fairly long time. I wish it would. I wish we were a more prosperous nation and that New Zealanders’ spending appetite was not so voracious but I am sorry Gareth Morgan is right. Foreign investment is actually going to help this nation. Some of the investment made by Shanghai Pengxin will bear fruits as we get better penetration into the Chinese retail market by partnering with companies like that. I just repeat again—I am almost having to go and get a bit of a reality check here—I could understand why say the Communist Party of New Zealand would be opposed to this although I do not know what its policy is— 
Todd McClay 
: The Greens? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No the Greens have not been quite that consistent either—there have not been a lot of words about some of it—but others have. But when a party that was in Government for 9 long years sold six-and-a-half cum seven times as much as the National Government did all I can say is that my gast is really flabbered.