Parker David: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Parker David: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1839. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 What balderdash we just heard from the Minister for Primary Industries for National. The reason that the National Government is passing this bill the Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill is that the practice that it wanted to adopt under the prior law was illegal. That is why it has changed the law. To accuse me and Helen Clark of acting improperly when we were just enforcing the law seems a little bit unusual to me as a legislator. 
Hon David Carter 
: You lost it in court Mr Parker. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Actually I will deal with some of the points that you raised Mr Carter because your understanding of the issues is obviously flawed. When I became Minister for Land Information the cry of the pastoral lessees was that they wanted the Government not to force them into tenure review and to respect their rights under statutory leases. I was at a meeting just the weekend before last where someone came up to me and said: “Oh I remember that first meeting with you”—speaking to me—“as then Minister of Land Information when you had that first meeting with the pastoral lessees.”  
I remember them saying to me on behalf of the Government to please respect the lessees’ rights under pastoral leases. My response to them was: “Yes I will.” They said “Please don’t force us into tenure review” and I said “I agree. I won’t.” And I said: “My duty as the Minister is to enforce the statutory lease on behalf of the lessor because that is who the Crown is and I am going to do that and I am going to only accept tenure review outcomes where I think they are in the Crown’s interest and I am going to do that.”  
That is all I did. I enforced the law. It seems pretty novel to the National Party that one might do that but that is all I did—that is all I did. It is true that the value of some of these properties has gone up hugely. Actually when values of properties go up rents normally follow. That is what happens in the private sector. In fact I think Mr Carter might own a property or two and occasionally when the value goes up I think you might put the rent up. Oh but not when you are the Minister and you have custody of these properties on behalf of the Crown and a voting section of your population. What you do then is you put the rent down for your mates. If this was a point of principle as to why you were doing this I could understand it but there are other mechanisms that could be used to address this.  
What we in the Labour Party found was that some of these rents were ridiculously low. I will give you one example. We had complaints from someone who had a big station in the Kyeburn area. They said it was worth millions of dollars that high country runoff grazing to their lowland farm. How much rent do members think they were paying for this thing that they said was worth millions of dollars to the value of their lowland farm? Less than $1500 per annum—$1500 per annum—plus GST. Less than that—I think it was about $1250 plus GST. It was an absurdly low rent.  
When I was Minister and we had some issues that needed to be resolved in the high country I thought: “Well I’ll apply the law”. So we got some valuation advice. It turned out that we had inconsistent valuation practice and some people were getting rents set on one basis and some people were getting rents set on another basis. So I took advice from Crown Law and I said: “What’s the correct basis to set rents?”. I then instructed the department to assess rents on that basis. These rents are set according to a statutory formula: not 10 percent of the value not 5 percent of the value but 2 percent of the land value excluding improvements. Improvements are excluded because they are already the property of the lessee but the lessor is entitled to rent under the current law which is changed by this bill at 2 percent of the land value excluding improvements if paid on time.  
When we did that we found that some of these properties are being purchased by people who are not buying them for pastoral values alone. People are paying sometimes $10 million for these properties because they are postcard properties. They are picture-postcard properties on the edges of lakes. They are on the edges of Lakes Wakatipu Wanaka Hawea Tekapo Ohau and Pukaki. People who are very very wealthy are on occasions buying these properties as effectively giant holiday homes. Sometimes they are being run as time-shares where a number of wealthy people own fractional interests in these properties and they are effectively using them as a giant holiday home. They purchase them knowing that the rent is 2 percent of the land value excluding improvements.  
In respect of those people I do not think they should get a rent discount. I do not think they should but there are other people who should. There are some farmers who extract only pastoral values—and Mr Carter has said that they have owned these farms for generation upon generation—and they cannot afford to pay the high rent. I have always acknowledged that. When the Labour Government was in we acknowledged that. I wrote to every one of those lessees personally. I can remember what a darned boring job it was signing out 236 letters or whatever it was to these people and I did it twice. I wrote to each of them and said: “If you cannot afford to pay the rent please come to us and we will negotiate a discount.” We wrote to every one of them.  
We said: “Look sometimes there are problems of access to adjacent rivers and lakes that we want to sort out.” because some of these properties surround lakes and there is no decent access for New Zealanders to go through these properties to get to the lakeside. I wanted to regularise access so that New Zealanders could access their lakes and rivers. I also said that there are occasions where we want to stop wilding pines spreading and we might like some wilding pine control or at least access on to the land to control the spread of those wilding pines. We also said explicitly in this letter—I still have copies of the letter and I remember writing them—“If you have an excessive rent that you can’t afford and we don’t need access to a river or lake and we don’t need wilding pine control well we’ll give you the rent discount anyway if you can’t afford to pay.”  
The lessees chose to say that they would not engage in this debate because it was coming to the end of our third term and they thought they would take their chances on being able to delay this long enough so that the Government would change and they could go through the back door and see that duke Mr Carter who would in the face of a $13 billion deficit give up on rents to multimillionaires who paid these prices knowing that the rent was 2 percent of the land— 
Hon David Carter 
: Here’s the envy! 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: It is not envy. It is not envy; it is a fact. Let us take the example of Shania Twain’s partner Mutt Lange who purchased a property up in Central Otago Mount Soho Station. He has actually done some very good conservation work. He has done some very good work up there and he farms the property very well but do we really think that we should be giving that person a discount when they paid many millions of dollars for that property knowing that the rent was 2 percent of the land value excluding improvements?  
What Mr Carter says is a bit like saying that the rent for a commercial property in Remuera ought to be the same as the rent for a commercial property in South Auckland. That is the logic that he is using. It is a nonsense because the two properties are of different values and the law said that they should be paying rent on the basis of land value excluding improvements.  
Mr Carter the other thing that I would say is I would take you back to that original meeting that I recounted to you where the lessees said they were fearful that the Government would change the law—they actually put this to me. They said: “Please don’t change the law on us. It’s terrible. This is sacrosanct. Don’t change the law.” They were fearful—and this was in the newspapers at the time—that the Labour Government would change the law and that that would be somehow interfering with their private property right. Well actually what Mr Carter is doing is opening Pandora’s box here because he is legislating to interfere with the Crown’s property right in these leases. Once that key is turned and that door is opened it has consequences in the future and it will have those consequences.  
Mr O’Connor said “Yes income-related rents are fine for those people who need them.” and we have said that. I have actually explained the letters that I wrote to similar effect to the lessees. But the people who do not need them who paid multimillion dollars for these properties knowing that the rent was 2 percent of land value excluding improvements ought not to be given a discount particularly when you are running a $13 billion deficit like this Government is and the deficit is worse as a consequence of this bill.  
Finally can I say that there has never ever been any hatred from this side of the House towards lessees. I value that heritage farming that historic practice in the high country. I actually think lessees protect against overdevelopment of the land. I do not think all these leases should be forced into tenure review but it does flow through to tenure review outcomes in a way that is unjust to the Crown.