Kedgley Sue: General Debate 
Kedgley Sue: General Debate 
[Volume:670;Page:16834] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party welcomes the enduring friendship between Australia and New Zealand. We were pleased to have the Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard address our Parliament in a special session in a way that did not undermine a long-held parliamentary convention. It is interesting that because of the same parliamentary convention we will not allow the Queen or the Governor-General to address our Parliament in the Chamber when it is in session yet most parties were only too eager to abandon the convention for the sake of Julia Gillard. 
It is also interesting that many members of the House have waxed eloquent about the warmth of our relationship with Australia and about how much we respect and admire Australians yet in the same Chamber our co-leader Dr Russel Norman is subjected to constant abuse by many members of the House particular by those on the National side simply because he is an Australian. I do not hear members shouting abuse at members who originate from England India or Sri Lanka but it is almost as though it is a sin or a crime for Dr Norman to be an Australian. He has to tolerate that level of abuse in the House. What does it say about our real respect for Australians? I learnt from the Prime Minister of Australia that one of our foremost Prime Ministers Michael Joseph Savage was an Australian. I wonder whether he too was subjected to similar abuse for the crime of being an Australian. 
The Green Party strongly supports building closer relations with our kith and kin across the Tasman. I doubt whether any politicians in the House have closer relations than we do with Green MPs in Australia. We have joint sessions and we have made joint submissions to Food Standards Australia New Zealand so we are very committed to having strong political and other ties with Australia. We acknowledge that we have more special ties with Australia than we do with any other nation but we want our relationship with Australia to be a partnership between two equal nations. We do not want to become effectively the seventh state of Australia or a country that is more and more controlled and dominated by Australia. 
Already most of our banks and many of our key institutions are owned by Australian businesses. The agreement today for further investment liberalisation will speed up that process. Lifting the threshold for Australian foreign investment that does not require any regulatory approval or scrutiny from our Overseas Investment Office will simply mean that more and more of our companies—and of course any future assets that the National Government puts up for sale—will end up in Australian ownership. The Government’s pledge that New Zealand investors will get the first crack at buying shares in any future sell-off of State-owned assets is simply a hollow pledge—pure spin really—because everyone knows that there is no way to prevent those shares from being sold offshore after a certain date. So on a day when we welcomed the Prime Minister of Australia into our Chamber I think it is appropriate that we reflect on our growing political as well as economic subservience to Australia. 
Some may sneer at that statement but the truth is that we have already forged one relationship—the treaty that set up Food Standards Australia New Zealand—whereby we are completely subservient to Australia and we have the same status as Tasmania. A previous National Government signed up to a deal in the mid-1990s whereby we ceded our sovereignty over food labelling and composition to Food Standards Australia New Zealand. That organisation is based in Canberra was set up under Australian legislation and is chaired by an Australian Minister for Health and Ageing and serviced by an Australian ministry. We have one vote out of 11 on the governing council—I repeat; one vote out of 11. That is hard to believe and when I point that out to New Zealanders they are outraged by it. 
The problem with our membership of Food Standards Australia New Zealand is not just that it is dominated by Australia and we have one vote out of 11 but that in joining up with Food Standards Australia New Zealand we gave up our jurisdiction—the jurisdiction of this Parliament—over all of the issues that we ceded to that body. We cannot pass laws in this House about food labelling or food composition. I discovered that when I introduced my Consumer’s Right to Know (Food Information) Bill. I went to the Clerk who said I could not say Parliament should introduce GE labelling or mandatory country-of-origin labelling. The Clerk said our Parliament has no jurisdiction over these matters. We have ceded that to the Australian-based body where we have one vote out of 11.