White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): I rise in support of the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill (No 3). I want to first comment on the contribution by ACT today. It is actually something which brings home the difference in the values between parties when I hear a statement which is so resolute and in support of foreign investment without any kind of nuance or control and actually without taking note of the lessons that have had to be learnt by successive Governments in this country.The bill that we are looking at today is one that comes from the first Act in 2005 which required a control over sensitive assets. In 2018 the Government commissioned a two-phase reform that sought to strike a balance. It isn't a situation where this Government does not care or encourage investment by foreigners; that is something that I think both of the major parties in support of this bill have acknowledged is a good thing. No one wants to stop good investment into this country.I was recently attending a Zoom conference of some of our greatest innovators in New Zealand. It was called Mission Economics and it was a conference where there were people participating from all around the world and they were talking about how in COVID one of the things that's happened is that we have had a shrinking of the geographical gap. We will have so many people and so many investors interested in being part of the New Zealand economy. What we have to do as a Government what we have to lead is we actually have to make sure that those investments are in the right places that they're stimulating that they're making our New Zealand a better place and that they're actually contributing to the wealth and health of New Zealanders.And so the first objective of that review in 2018 was to make sure that those investments were encouraged and this bill will do that but it will do it in an appropriate way because it's balanced by the second objective which is the controlling of investment where it might cause a risk where it might undermine the New Zealand way of life. We need to make sure that we're controlling foreign entities in the sensitive assets in this country and that is things like our farmland that is our fishing quotas that is assets that are important to our cultural wellbeing and that includes our taonga.I want to talk about what happened next because we had a very difficult year last year where we were faced with a pandemic. This Government noticed the vulnerability that was present and it acted proactively when it brought in urgent measures that sought to make sure that overseas investment didn't happen in the wrong way—and that would have been if we had had a terrible downturn; luckily we were able to avoid the worst of that. But basically they made sure that the law was fit for purpose at a time of crisis so that there wasn't a fire sale and so we didn't lose our assets to overseas companies when actually we needed to make sure that we kept them safe and that we had a long-term view. If there had been people who were at the brink of bankruptcy in their investments here and they had sought the highest bidder it probably would have been overseas. So it was a very important urgent measure that took place.But then the Government has had the sense to go back and look at the reforms it made at that time and actually make sure that people during the select committee process were able to look at what had happened review it and take a more measured and nuanced response. We did that. At the Finance and Expenditure Committee we had submissions where we learnt lessons. So this bill is very much a product of that learning curve because some of those measures were probably a little blunt and we've been able to just actually rein things in and make them as long term and fit for purpose as we possibly could.So I think it's probably worth going through some of those changes. The first is that we have narrowed the national interest test. So we had something that was a little bit broad and we've made sure that it's narrowed. We've also brought in call-in powers—so we've kept those and again we have looked at being able to block and impose conditions on the acquisition of assets which actually put New Zealanders at significant vulnerability if they are sold overseas.So for example the ports: if somebody wanted to buy the ports that might be something that we would look at and think Actually owning the ports overseas would actually cause difficulties for New Zealanders." The same is true for things like the EFTPOS system I suspect and electricity—those things that we really rely on as New Zealanders. We need constraints and we've kept the capacity to act very urgently and to keep those constraints. We have actually kept and tightened constraints on farmland and that is something that I think we have learnt the lessons of over a long period of time. I was very distressed to see the sale of farmland without very much thought to the fact that this is an incredibly important industry in the country but it's also important to what New Zealanders are—it's part of our culture. This is a farming country; this is our main asset.So to do that is a really important thing. Then we also learnt that there were parts of that land that were perhaps unproductive that were moving and we didn't basically cut off our nose to spite our face. We did things like made sure that land which was not as important for farmland any more—maybe unproductive—was something that we might be able to encourage investment in where appropriate. So for example we had a submitter come and talk about rent-to-buys and they are a big international entity that wants to pour money into building houses for New Zealanders because they do this all around the world. They will be able to source land that was maybe once farmland but is not productive any more and they would be encouraged to invest in those things by this legislation.The other part of this is actually that we looked at the whole idea of foreign control versus passive investment. So there's really a much more sensitive approach to that. Where there is actual foreign control implicated in an investment—perhaps from a foreign Government or you know serious amounts of control—then that is looked at quite differently from passive investment; so investments that might be a super fund which might be somewhere else. Those are the investments that we still want and need.So this is actually a bill which is the sum total of three. It's a very good piece of legislation; it's come in in a steady and controlled way. It is a very different ideology from that that ACT supported. It's actually something that is very much part of a consensus between the parties that have governed this country for some time because it is something that I think we all agree on it is something that will support a value system that's become common to New Zealanders and I commend this bill to the House."