Peters Winston: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Peters Winston: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 04 April 2012. Volume:679;Page:1654. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 We in New Zealand First add our sentiments to the last speech particularly in respect of the Rev. Hone Kaa. But this speech is about a new Manchurian candidate. The Government is going to spend the next few— 
Jami-Lee Ross 
: Who’s the mandarin? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I will tell you who the mandarin is and I will tell you who the puppets are and you might as well get a mirror because it will help you identify whom I am talking about. 
This Government is going to be closing the saga of the Crafar farms and all that it is doing is waiting to sneak this deal through when no one is watching. First there is no doubt that the deal will be announced whilst the Prime Minister is out of the country. Second the Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin will be the buyer. Third it has been promised a prime chunk of New Zealand land even though the High Court ruled there was absolutely no economic gain to this country.  
Look at the history. First it was Jack Chen and May Wang. The Overseas Investment Office had that application before it for month after month when one phone call to the Hong Kong stock exchange would have told it what it had found and that was that they were not of sufficient character. 
So out of left field comes the next Chinese deal in the form of Shanghai Pengxin. Again it was before the Overseas Investment Office for months and months. Any decent provincial lawyer knowing about land could have assessed this in 3 days flat but no no it took month after month. Why? Because there was an election coming up and they could not possibly run that past the people before the 2011 election. But the Ministers in charge here—namely Coleman and Williamson—would rubber-stamp anything and the High Court said as much when they appeared to not even understand the law that they were acting under. 
This was all of course before the election. After the election it was OK for Landcorp to do what the Prime Minister had said before the election would not be done. He said that we do not want to be servants in our own country. So what is happening here? Well under a rough sharemilking deal Landcorp will be paying $18 million a year to the Shanghai Pengxin company to occupy the land. Is that being a tenant in your own country or not? But worse still this is a State-owned enterprise owned by the people of this country. It has been frogmarched into a deal with a Chinese company that knows absolutely nothing about dairy farming. Some Chinese do; this bunch does not. Surely that is being a tenant in our own country.  
Since the High Court decision 6 weeks ago the deal has been kept under wraps. That is because officials and Ministers have been doing more backflips than a team of gymnasts to beat the High Court ruling. We all know what is going on and all through this the Prime Minister has known what is going on. He has hung his hat on China. He has done a deal just like all those sordid deals that the firm he got his training from—Merrill Lynch—did that took as everybody knows today the Western World to the brink of financial collapse. The Chinese want to close the deal. So does the Prime Minister but not when everyone is watching or listening. 
I want to say to the backbenchers in the National Party that there are hundreds of thousands of National voters who know what I am talking about and who are utterly opposed to this deal. I appeal to every true New Zealander in this House or listening to this debate today. It is now over to them to rise up and do something because this deal is the first of many of this character. Stand up for God’s sake for your country. I know there are members of the National Party who are worried sick about the sell-out of New Zealand. We appeal to their sense of decency and their sense of patriotism. Do not let this happen. Far too much of this country is already overseas-owned. If we want to ever get back to where we once were—at the top of the world—we have to become masters of our own fate and arbiters of our own destiny. It is not a matter of globalisation and internationalism; it is about our country. 
We have never asked these National backbenchers to do anything before. We ask them now. Do not make New Zealand another province of China. Remember the novel  
The Manchurian Candidate 
? 
It looks like “The Manchurian Candidate Mark II” is sitting live and well at the top floor of the Beehive. Well he can sell this country out but you will pay the price for it next election.