Goff Phil: Overseas Investment (Owning our Own Rural Land) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Overseas Investment (Owning our Own Rural Land) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5251. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): Clearly the research unit of the National Party faced a dilemma when it was drafting the identical notes for the National Party backbench. The dilemma is this: fundamentally the National Party understands that New Zealanders support the approach that I am proposing in the Overseas Investment (Owning our Own Rural Land) Amendment Bill. I say that not as a rash claim; the New Zealand Herald has run a Herald-DigiPoll on this bill and it shows that 55 percent of New Zealanders support it and 33 percent of New Zealanders oppose it. That means that there is cross-party support for this bill.I reckon if I went to David Bennett’s electorate in Hamilton East and talked to his farmers they would have something to say about this and they would be positive about it. In fact I saw the president of Federated Farmers—known elsewhere as the “National Party in Gumboots” but the president is a very fine guy—William Rolleston warning New Zealanders about the risks of wholesale loss of land to overseas investors. He was telling New Zealanders about vertical integration where foreign individuals or companies owned everything from the farm right down to the supermarket shelves and the risk that that posed to New Zealand’s interests. That was from Federated Farmers. I heard the mogul of the free enterprise world. He had a very spirited dinner I think. I was going to ask for an interpretation of his speech. I looked to the National Party benches and they could not help.The two freest market economies in the world are probably Hong Kong and Singapore—both Chinese by the way which is apropos of nothing. They place restrictions on foreign ownership of lands and residential properties. This is not unusual. Any Government that is worth its salt puts the interests of its residents before the interests of foreign investors. We will have foreign investment in this country where it is good for New Zealand. But where it simply forces up residential property prices or forces young New Zealanders to remain the sharemilkers and the employees instead of the farmers we will unashamedly stand up for New Zealanders. We give no apology for that whatsoever. The National research unit had a choice. It thought it could either say this bill is no different from what National is doing and National tried to run that line or say this bill is fundamentally racist and it tried to run that line as well. But unfortunately those two arguments are mutually contradictory.I want to say that New Zealanders have had a gutsful of people who play the race card in reverse. Let me give you an example. There is a well-known property developer in Auckland who this week was rack-renting trailer homes where 14 people were forced to share one toilet to new migrants.Hon Members: Oh!Hon PHIL GOFF: That was wrong. That is wrong in anybody’s language. But because that property developer happened to be Donghua Liu when he was criticised we were told that that criticism was racist. That criticism was not racist. That criticism was criticism of an individual regardless of his ethnicity who was behaving in an inappropriate and unethical way—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come to your bill.Hon PHIL GOFF: —and I will not accept any criticism from any member on that party which ran the “Kiwi not iwi” ads and stood behind Don Brash and that man. I will not take any criticism from those people at all. There is nothing in my bill that discriminates against any New Zealander. What it does is it acts on behalf of every New Zealander. I have talked to my Chinese constituents and my Indian constituents and they think that it is a good idea that New Zealand should own its own future because those Chinese and those Indian constituents are proud to be New Zealanders and this bill stands up for New Zealanders. So do not come at me with a cheap and shabby criticism that is not worthy of many of those people on that bench who should know better.What this bill does very clearly is what the National Party promised to do but failed to deliver. It says and the Overseas Investment Act says that owning land if you are a foreigner is a privilege and you have to earn that privilege. The way you earn that privilege is by showing that you produce substantially more jobs or substantially more exports. If you cannot come up to that standard do not come here—