Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I want to carry on from where my colleague Phil Twyford left off making the link between foreign buyers and affordability in the New Zealand housing market. The Labour Party position is that if you have got the right to live here you have got the right to buy here. That is true whether you are a migrant who has arrived just a month ago with permanent residency or you are someone who has lived here for ever. If you do not have the right to live here we do not think you should have the right to buy here because we think that is having an effect on the price of housing. The experience around the Pacific Rim and in London and other places that are safe havens for capital in a turbulent world is that with the free flow of capital unconstrained by local rules relating to homeownership those flows of capital pump up the price of housing beyond the price that locals can afford to pay. So the effect of not having a control on foreign buyers of New Zealand land with houses on it is that the housing starts to be priced not according to the means of New Zealanders to buy housing but according to the deep pockets of those who are from overseas. There can be a debate as to how much the effect from foreign buyers is on prices but there cannot be a reasoned debate that there is none. As to how much the effect of foreign buyers is—countries around the world are concluding that it is a material and substantial effect. Australia has moved to stop it. Canada has moved to stop it. Hong Kong has moved to stop it. China has moved to stop it. There are huge controversies in London and the United Kingdom. One of the reasons behind Brexit was that people cannot afford housing in those large centres. In New Zealand the evidence is pretty clear. You know there are billboards that are put up periodically in Ponsonby Road—some of the most expensive billboard space in New Zealand—advertising real estate agents to list your properties with who are selling directly into China. They are selling directly into China. They advertise their websites. Those billboards—we cannot afford them in the Labour Party. It costs many thousands of dollars each week to hire that billboard space for an advertisement. There is a lot of money being made on the sales of New Zealand houses to overseas interests.Another example—we know that some of the people who if you like win the prizes for being the most successful real estate agents in Auckland are those who are servicing those markets. We have got instances of buyers from overseas coming to New Zealand and not buying one house but actually buying many houses on the same day some of them sight unseen. I make the point again that this is not somehow anti-Chinese or as it used to be anti-Japanese or anti any other ethnic group. You know I have been accused of those things previously when in respect of rural land I criticised American purchases Swiss purchases and French purchases. And when I criticised Chinese purchases in respect of Shanghai Pengxin's purchase of the Crafer farms it was then that I was accused of racism or xenophobia when I was making the same point every time and that is that the market for New Zealand land assets—and in this case housing assets—should be a New Zealand market not an overseas market. Why do we need this law? Why do we have to make this clear that the Government has not got the discretion to allow our houses to be sold overseas? Well we know that the Government has traded away our rights to put in place a control such as that under the Korean free-trade agreement. Korea retains the right to stop New Zealanders buying their houses but under the Korean free-trade agreement the Government agreed that we would never ban the sale of New Zealand houses to Korean people notwithstanding that in the free-trade agreement that had been agreed to within the last year or two with Australia South Korea agreed that Australia could stop Koreans buying Australian houses. So of course the even bigger effect of that is the flow-on effect into other trade agreements because under trade agreements they have the most favoured nation clause which effectively says that if you do a better deal in a later trade agreement than in your original trade agreement it flows through to the benefit of the earlier trade agreement. The Labour Government of which I was part negotiated the free-trade agreement with China. I was in Cabinet and I remember sitting in a policy committee—because I had been worried about these land issues for a long time—and I asked the question: Have we retained the ability to control whom we sell our houses to and change those rules?". Annette King is nodding her head. She was probably in the same policy committee. I can remember Helen Clark saying: "We'd better check that." The officials could not answer it on the day and so we asked the officials to go away and check that under the Chinese free-trade agreement we were retaining the right to change which asset classes we restricted Chinese people buying into in New Zealand. The answer was "Well China is retaining the right to ban New Zealand buyers of their houses." and under the Chinese free-trade agreement New Zealand retained the right to ban Chinese purchases of New Zealand houses. How did that change? Because of the most favoured nation clause which is in just about all of our trade agreements because the National Government gave away—it sold New Zealanders down the drain under the South Korean free-trade agreement. That provision flows through under the most favoured nation clause to China. That can be fixed—because I am sure the South Korean agreement could be fixed if we had a Government that wanted to—as evidenced by the fact that South Korea has retained the right in South Korea to ban New Zealand buyers of homes in its country and Australia got the same thing. So it is an absolutely ideological selling out of New Zealanders' interests trying to curb the rights of a future Government. But it gets worse. What is the biggest trade agreement in the world? The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). What did this Government do in the TPP? Notwithstanding the lesson that we thought we had taught the Government and notwithstanding the fact that actually Labour is a pro-trade party National went further and in the investment protocols under the TPP said that New Zealand would not introduce new areas of screening—i.e. we would not ban the overseas sales of New Zealand houses to Americans or Japanese or anyone else in the TPP. That is why we need this amendment because this amendment amends the Overseas Investment Act to make it clear that the Minister cannot just wash his hands of the effect of putting the best of our houses out of reach of New Zealanders and lifting the price of houses in a way that is unaffordable in New Zealand. If passed this amendment closes that glaring hole in New Zealand's law and says that if you have got the right to live here you have got the right to buy here that it should be a New Zealand market and that we should not have people from overseas who are the "1 percenters" of the world—and sometimes coming through with dirty money which we have seen through the Panama Papers. Those sorts of people cannot come here with some of it being stolen money or whatever else—they cannot come here and outbid New Zealanders for our houses. Houses are to live in. The people whose interests we should be serving most are New Zealanders. They are the people whom the New Zealand Government should be acting to protect not foreign buyers who want to speculate who want to move money to a safe jurisdiction who want to have another investment class and who want to price New Zealanders out of our own homes. This Government in this area most plainly prefers the interests of overseas people over New Zealanders. That is why this provision is so essential if we are going to get the housing crisis in Auckland under control because most of that purchase pressure is in Auckland. The Korean free-trade agreement the Chinese free-trade agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement—what more proof do you need that you need change in the underlying legislation? This Parliament should be telling the executive that in respect of these things New Zealanders do not want to sell down the river the right of future Governments to control who buys their houses. We have got the ability in this vote today to put that into law and I bet you that the Government will try to block it. It has already even tried to close down debate on the issue through Minister Woodhouse—"