Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I can't even begin although I'm going to try to express what an outrage this is and I'm going to do it in reference to some recent practical experience of select committee consideration of bills under time pressure under this Government. I refer to the Finance and Expenditure Committee's consideration of the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill. You see much as with this bill that was a bill that had to be considered due to external time pressures in a truncated period. In that particular case it was due to pressure created by the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. It was also a bill that had been hastily put together and badly drafted and let me tell you what transpired. We had 220 submissions almost all of them from the business community almost all of them substantive and intelligent submissions about the effect that this bill would have on their industries. I think for that reason that the Finance and Expenditure Committee's consideration of the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill is a very useful benchmark for what might be a reasonable expectation for a select committee to hear about a major regulatory initiative that affects long-term investment in industry in New Zealand particularly foreign investment and so I'd like to tell you a little bit more about it. You see sometimes things sound simple but once you get into the detail they are not simple at all. The basic intention of the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill was simply to prevent foreigners buying residential property just as in the case of this particular bill it sounds simple enough: it's to ban future exploration for oil and gas. What transpired was there were all sorts of difficulties. For instance what defines a foreign person who might invest in a residential property and what defines a residential property? Well it turned out that the definition the Government had chosen in its drafting was a 25 percent offshore stake in ownership and it turned out that a whole lot of companies that weren't even considered by most New Zealanders to be foreign met that criteria. And so the committee had to hear from a much wider range of people who were affected than they ever could have anticipated. I put to the House that the range of people who are affected by this legislation will be much broader than currently anticipated just as it was with the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill just a few short months ago. I'd put it to you that the nature of the oil and gas industry ironically enough is that it is an ecosystem. There is upstream; there's downstream. There's the service industry around it. There are the suppliers. There are the people that process the products not only for energy but into a range of other products. The range of people that will want to have a submission on this particular piece of legislation will be vastly wider than even the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill. Remember we heard 220 substantial submissions on that bill at the Finance and Expenditure Committee. So that's the first point: the range of people likely to be affected by this bill will be completely impractical to hear within four weeks. It is an outrage.But secondly the complexity of issues that get created will be much greater than what is anticipated by the Government as it goes into these legislative processes again because we're mainly dealing in unknown unknowns. We don't know what the complexity will be with this bill but let me tell you a bit more about what happened with the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill. Just a few short months—same issue: major regulatory initiative overseas investment involved very tight time frames Government trying to legislate at haste and repent at leisure and what happened was that we on the committee discovered there were all sorts of unintended consequences. For example who would have thought that telecommunications companies have to buy residential land in order to put up cell towers every time there's a new subdivision? So as a result the committee had to consider that and we ended up exempting registered telecommunications companies from the bill. But it gets worse. Of course all of the same arguments it turned out applied to electricity distributors. Then we found that actually one of the biggest I guess safety valves on the demand for housing or the pressure on the supply of housing was actually older people in the community moving into retirement villages. Well as it turns out all of the big retirement village operators have more than 25 percent foreign ownership. So the Government had inadvertently banned the development of residential property by retirement villages even though most of those brands—Ryman Healthcare Metlifecare etc.—would be considered by most New Zealanders to be New Zealand companies. This is the kind of complexity that we are going to have once we start to examine this bill. I defy anybody to hear that level of complexity from that number of submitters—which I think will if anything be greater and more complex than the nearest equivalent we have to compare this bill with this year. It will not just take more than four weeks; it probably would be reasonable for it to take more than the usual six months.Here's the other reason why this House might want to extend the sitting—actually the last time I had a bill in this House I recommended nine months and I recommend that nine months would be the right amount of time for this bill if it's going to advance at all.Hon Tim Macindoe: Will it get 35000 submissions?DAVID SEYMOUR: Well you never know. It just might. Maybe if the churches are opposed to this bill it just might. But the fact of the matter is that one of the things that we are responsible for in this House is that we are custodians of New Zealand's international reputation. The basic view in the oil and gas industry around the world is that New Zealand is pretty hard yakka when it comes to the amount of reserves and the accessibility of them. It would be easier to go to a place like say Venezuela where it basically bubbles out of the ground and you don't have to do much. But one thing New Zealand does have unlike most oil-rich places in the world is a stable set of institutions and laws so people know that if they make an investment in New Zealand it's not going to be whipped away from them Hugo Chávez Venezuelan style. That is one of the most important capital assets that this country has in the world: it is trust. I'd invite the House to reflect carefully on the impact that we're going to have if we decide tonight that we don't want to have any practical opportunity for a highly complex industry—an ecosystem of businesses—to be heard on a highly complex matter such as what the lead times are and what happens when all of a sudden an important stage in the business cycle for this industry is no longer there. There are people in Taranaki who have things to say. I visited Fitzroy Engineering just to give an example a few months ago when the Government made this initial announcement. Those guys have to think very carefully about whether they invest and upgrade their plant with multi-decade time frames in order that they can continue to be maintainers of assets in the oil and gas sector. Now what message are we sending to the rest of the world when we say we are this tinpot little country where Parliament doesn't even understand basic things like that—that people have to invest in the long term in order to accumulate capital assets and raise our standard of living?I put it to you that people in the business community around the world are looking at New Zealand and they're thinking What on earth are those guys doing? Are they in a state of transition? Are they going from being a First World sophisticated country that is a democracy that listens to people and follows due process and turning into sort of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela? What are they up to?" Well this House has the opportunity to send a signal tonight that we're still a proper open democracy by giving nine months for submissions on this bill."