Cosgrove Clayton: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Cosgrove Clayton: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations  and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:631;Page:3071] 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Associate Minister of Finance) 
: 
 I thank the member for his contribution but I want to take a short call to rebut a couple of the points he made. First in my view Landcorp is one of our premier State-owned enterprises. As a member of the Primary Production Committee some time ago I paid a number of visits to Landcorp facilities and farms along with a couple of other members. It is a premier State-owned enterprise. For instance in the last 2 years it has returned to the Crown a dividend of $36 million. 
I want to touch on a couple of points that Mr Tanczos made in respect of deforestation and the decision on that. The decision was not Landcorp’s. I will give an example of what happened. Landcorp decided to take up a contract offered by Kiwi Forests which was the owner of some land to convert that land for dairy farming. If Landcorp had not taken up the contract it would have been offered to someone else and the land would have been converted for dairy farming anyway. So the decision to deforest the land was not the State-owned enterprise’s. If deforestation would have occurred anyway my view is that the State-owned enterprise should be in there as the superb farmer that it is making money for the Crown. 
I also say that if one looks at the performance of the Landcorp entity one can see that it has performed outstandingly on the back of strong commodity prices. It oversaw the transition of ownership of Molesworth Station to the Department of Conservation. Landcorp continues to farm on that property now despite the dire predictions that I recall came at the time from the Opposition. I think Mr David Carter waxed eloquently at the time making dire predictions about the handover of that land and what it would mean in terms of reducing Landcorp’s ability to farm it. As usual the reality was different from the predictions. Also if one looks at the lambing percentages one can see that they are incredible. They are 135.8 percent which is a record high compared with the previous year’s 127.9 percent. 
Landcorp is a really good solid State-owned enterprise. It is one of our premier State-owned enterprises run by a fine board with a fine chief executive and by a very solid management team. Landcorp also contributes to something that I think is important in the farming sector and in rural industry which is training. It does an impressive amount of training and upskilling which is then re-injected as people pass through that entity and back into the farming communities. 
To conclude I want to touch briefly on a bit of history. Landcorp was previously on the hit list. I recall when Labour came into Government going to a Landcorp dinner and being told it was fantastic that the Labour Government had come in and told Landcorp squarely that it was not for sale. I was told that because Landcorp knew it was not for sale given those parameters it could actually get on and make some money for the taxpayer and improve the State-owned enterprise by doing some long-term planning. Prior to 1999 Landcorp was on the block. Labour defeated the National Party at the election then and put that issue to bed. Not to be outdone a great strategist—probably Murray McCully I suspect—decided to revisit that proposal in 2002 and again in 2005 and to say to the country we should sell off one of our biggest landowners probably to the foreign interests that come in start to subdivide land gobble everything up and then compete with it. 
We say again to Landcorp to the people of this country and to this Parliament that under the stewardship of this Government the Landcorp asset—which is a huge asset in the public mind and in the community context—is not up for grabs. I welcome the next election because I assume the National Party will recycle for the fourth time its failed policy of going to the public and telling them that we should sell Landcorp to foreign interests have it carved up have somebody else come and take over and reduce to zero the dividend that our taxpayers receive through the Crown.