Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. The Green Party is pleased to be supporting the Land Transfer (Foreign Ownership of Land Register) Amendment Bill because at the moment we do not have an accurate picture of how much land in New Zealand is owned by overseas persons and without that understanding we cannot develop good policy and we cannot fully understand the assets that we are actually alienating. Until 1998 Government agencies did not even think it was necessary to record any of the purchases by overseas investors.Alastair Scott the previous speaker claimed that the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) scrutinises investment in land. That is only if it is sensitive land which is quite a narrow category of land. It does include some rural farmland but we do not have a good picture across the whole of New Zealand. So this bill is a useful small step to actually ensuring that there is a good information base by requiring overseas persons to provide information about their name their nationality and the amount and value of the land that is being purchased and the land district it is in.But it does not go far enough. The Green Party believes that landownership in New Zealand should be limited to New Zealand citizens and permanent residents. We would introduce legislation to restrict the purchase of our whenua of our land by non-citizens and non-residents because we have seen with the Overseas Investment Office that almost universally—except in the case of Lochinver Station—the OIO has just rubber-stamped purchases of quite significant areas of productive land.You cannot have an economic strategy of adding value to our primary products when New Zealanders are steadily losing ownership of our land our forests and other productive assets in that value chain. They are the building blocks of our economy and when we have got more than 40 percent of overseas investment concentrated in agribusiness energy and large-scale real estate we are seeing ourselves alienated from ownership of those basic building blocks. We do not want our primary industries and our natural resources to be owned and dominated by overseas companies because we cannot control the value chain when we do not own our own forests and our farmland.National could smarten up but it will not—it could stop our most productive farmlands slipping into overseas ownership but it will not. That is one of the reasons why the Green Party is supporting this bill: so that we get a better understanding of just how much is being alienated because at the moment it is media speculation. There are estimates that between 5 and 10 percent of our most productive farmland is being sold to overseas persons. If it is 5 percent that is an area the size of the Auckland super-city. By a very simple change in the law—by restricting the sale of land that is more than half a hectare to New Zealand residents and New Zealand citizens—we could prevent that alienation. That would ensure that our productive farmland stays in Kiwi hands.As David Cunliffe noted the whenua is critical. If we want to be proud residents of Aotearoa we should actually ensure that our economic base and all of the industries that depend on it are generating revenue for New Zealanders and that we do not simply become tenants in our own country. That is one of the reasons the Green Party is supporting this bill.