McKelvie Ian; Rurawhe AdrianIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Well this is a funny place this Parliament. You know some days you go home at night thinking Oh we've had a great day we've achieved a little bit." Some days you go home at night wondering why you're here and some days you go home at night wondering if what's going to happen as a result of your having been here. I've got to say that this is one of those days.I listened to the Minister a little earlier on saying that in 2013 he dreamt up this bill—2013. That's quite a long time ago. And you know you would think that he would have noticed that the world's changed a little bit in those years since 2013—five whole years. The economy's changed dramatically in that time. And to listen to the last speaker the Hon Eugenie Sage speaking in much the same mode you'd wonder where they'd been for the last five years. I remember for some time sitting in numerous select committees actually with the Hon Eugenie Sage the Hon David Cunliffe and the Hon Damien O'Connor moaning and moaning and moaning about this exact piece of legislation and what they weren't going to do when they got to the point of being able to implement it. Well I find it very disappointing that we've got to this point five years later and the piece of legislation is still in exactly the same form that they designed it those five long years ago.This is without question one of the worst pieces of legislation I've ever seen in my time in Parliament. It's not the worst piece of legislation because I disagree with the philosophy; they're absolutely entitled—anyone in this place is entitled to have a philosophy which then enables them to implement it in legislation. It would be really nice if that piece of legislation was being implemented at the time of implementation—in other words if they were using what was going on in the economy and in the world right now it would be very relevant. It's not.We then listened to the member for New Zealand First who I think originates out of Southland the place where—almost half the land in Southland has not only changed in ownership but changed in land use in the last 10 or 15 years. It's quite possible I guess that under this piece of legislation half of Southland could go into pine trees. He'd look pretty odd then wouldn't he? That's exactly what this piece of legislation could achieve because it enables people to buy land—and I'm talking about foreign owners buying land—in any part of New Zealand. It doesn't matter whether it's class one land or class 10 land; they can buy any sort of land and plant it with trees because that's the blindness with which this piece of legislation is being approached and the history drives it to be in that form I think.So I think it creates a couple of real problems this piece of legislation and both in critical areas for this Government and I think critical areas for New Zealand. One's around housing investment because instead of encouraging investment in housing—and whether we like it or not in New Zealand we need foreign capital; we need injections of capital into this country—this piece of legislation is going to stop that piece of foreign capital being injected into the housing market in New Zealand. It's going to stop the apartment market stone-dead. I can explain why: because no one in a falling housing market or even a stable housing market is ever going to invest in an apartment that they can't live in. The reason for that is because the moment they don't live in it and they let it out it depreciates in value so no one no absentee owner is going to invest in that type of opportunity. In a rising market they probably would and probably did. I think the same thing exactly happens in the forestry market and we're going to see some challenging times in that market too. Other than the climate change thing—which our Minister Sage talked about—there's no capacity in New Zealand and there won't be capacity in New Zealand for further forestry manufacturing and production other than sending those logs out through the ports. So that raises a couple more issues because the ports in New Zealand—whilst the roads of national significance and some of the work that is still ongoing in that area have made those ports more accessible it hasn't made the ports any more efficient or any bigger or able to deal with the quantity of timber going out of the country now. Imagine what's going to happen as we increase the planting of forestry in New Zealand. The reason for that is that the RMA—and I'll get back to that in a minute. The Resource Management Act precludes any form of further production lines being built in this country and there will be no investment in that either in the next—until such time as that Act changes. That RMA is also inhibiting and has inhibited significantly the development of housing particularly in Auckland. The Auckland plan concluded that of course and some efforts were made under the previous Government to alter that regime. It hasn't been entirely successful and it will need a lot more work. So it doesn't matter what we do with legislation like this this type of legislation is not going to manage the problem that we've got because there are some significant problems in behind it.The next thing that I want to get on to is the exemptions and there were a number of exemptions talked about in the committee stage of this bill. There were also some exemptions brought to the select committee by the Government or by the Minister and there were also over I think something in excess of 60 submitters who all would have liked to have had exemptions for their particular industry. It doesn't matter what it was; whether it was aged care health—all those sorts of things were looking for exemptions. Now the very fact that almost all submitters were looking for an exemption really meant they're all struggling for capital and are all struggling for investment opportunity in New Zealand. That again precludes those industries from expanding at the rate we would like them to.The next thing I want to touch on is the potential for depopulation in provincial New Zealand caused by unplanned planting of pine trees or of trees. We've already seen in provincial New Zealand significant depopulation—the Bay of Plenty some parts of the East Coast and certainly in the central North Island where depopulation becomes an issue because the trees are planted with no thought to the future. I've got no problem with planting trees; I think it's a great scheme to plant trees but the problem is we plant them randomly and we plant them everywhere and that's a real challenge for us. We need to plan this whole planting of trees much better. The potential for foreign investment in this land will preclude us from being able to in my view plan the planting of those trees in a proper manner. I also listened to the Minister give what I thought was a pretty unconvincing speech when he introduced the bill for its third reading today. Not only was he unconvincing but I also had a great deal of sympathy for the officials that went through the process of trying to put this bill in place because you could see in their faces that they were struggling to make it relevant and I think it has struggled to find relevance. I think there are such a lot of shortcomings in this bill that to apply compliance to it's going to be almost impossible. The costs of that compliance—there's been no work done on the cost of that compliance. That will be significant and when you think about it from an investor's perspective if they have a significant cost of compliance in the lead-up to their investment decisions they're not going to make those investment decisions—they're not going to make that opportunity available to New Zealand. So again even though the opportunity's there for investment in both forestry land and in apartments and in fact in residential land it's very unlikely to happen because they've been precluded from doing it.One last point on that of course is perception. When you tell them they're not welcome in New Zealand whether you like it or not you can't legislate to make them come back. The moment you tell someone they're not welcome they have that feeling they don't ever want to come back. And I don't blame foreign money for leaving the country and not entering at the rate we require it at because they've been told and have the impression that they're not wanted back.Governments have the ability to distort markets and you never know when a piece of legislation is put in place what the reaction of the market to that piece of legislation is going to be. And I guess whilst I understand the Government's—well I don't understand it but I recognise that the Government has a will to drop house prices and there was some discussion in the House about that today. If you take 10 percent off a house price and the deposit's been 10 percent then that poor person's got no equity left.I think there's a very real possibility that this legislation will have a distorting effect on not only land prices but land use and I don't think that Governments can ever interfere or should ever interfere in land-use trends. I think they should make sure the planning's done around land use and what might happen in the future. And again I think if you look at some of the changes we've seen in land use in New Zealand in the last few years it hasn't all been positive but it hasn't been positive because the planning hasn't been done before the land use took place. That's something we very much need to consider.In my view this is a sad piece of legislation. It's an old piece of legislation that in my view has run its course has been introduced far too late and has been introduced from an idealistic perspective that I think is tragic for New Zealand and for the housing market in New Zealand particularly. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Willow-Jean Prime."