Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I enjoyed that last contribution immensely. It was as though the member who just resumed her seat Deborah Russell had been on cut-price acting lessons. All I can say is I think she should keep winding up the drama. We're actually here to make legislation—high-quality legislation—for the future of New Zealand and I have to say that in almost four years in this House I have not seen a more ham-fisted attempt at legislating.Let's just pause and ask ourselves what this bill intends to do. Well the member did get one thing right: it intends to stop foreign entities from purchasing residential land. And that leads to a couple of questions: what's a foreign entity" and what's "residential land"? Well under the Overseas Investment Act a foreign entity is anything with more than 25 percent foreign ownership—an overseas person they call it—and residential land is usually defined by councils. It's pretty laborious but there are a whole lot of definitions and it basically comes back to what most New Zealanders would think of as a residential area—a suburb or an area where mostly people live.Well the interesting thing is that in order to achieve the objectives of the bill to make housing more affordable for New Zealanders one of the things that has to happen is we need people to build more homes. Home building it turns out—as we found in the select committee before the Government went into reverse gear at great speed putting all sorts of exemptions and carve-outs into the bill—tends to involve a lot of foreign entities purchasing residential land. You see when you have a home in a modern country like New Zealand you need things like electricity and you need things like telecommunications; sometimes older people in the community need things like retirement villages. The thing about big telcos and electricity companies and retirement villages is that many of them are listed globally on sharemarkets called the Australian Stock Exchange—if anyone from New Zealand First has heard of that come and see me later—and that means that many of them are more than 25 percent foreign-owned. So it suddenly means that we would go from about 150 Overseas Investment Office applications per year to an estimated 2700 as all of these organisations that are involved in building homes—whether it's Ryman Healthcare or whether it's Spark or whether it's an electricity reticulator—would all of a sudden have to go through the Overseas Investment Office.Of course what the Government did once it realised that it had basically made it impossible for the New Zealand construction sector to build homes—I mean you can't make up how stupid this bill is—is they then started putting in exemptions for just about everything to the point where the bill has become meaningless. It's a case study in bad law-making but it's also a case study in this particular Government of how poor their understanding of the country's history and economy is. You see the history of this country is actually a history of foreign investment. Right back to the time that Kupe sailed up on the beach with a waka hourua and a couple of kunekune pigs we have been bringing foreign capital to this country and we've never looked back and so it remains in the construction of housing today.This Government is out of touch with that reality. They came into Government with things like the despicable Chinese-sounding names publicity stunt on a wave of xenophobia and the premise that we must do something. Their minor premise: "This is something."; their conclusion: "Let's introduce the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill." even though it will not achieve anything like what it intended to achieve. In actual fact if it has any effect it will prevent much-needed foreign investment from boosting the construction sector and adding to the number of homes in New Zealand.That's what happens when you have an accidental Government with no real policy agenda with no real policy understanding wasting this House's time by putting in place legislation that will not achieve its stated objective. Just ask Vancouver. Just ask Auckland—after we required IRD numbers and bank accounts—whether restrictions on foreign capital inflows actually affect house prices. It won't achieve its objective but it will put all sorts of roadblocks in the way of building more homes and for that reason it's easily the stupidest bill I've seen in four years. I proudly stand for the ACT Party in opposition to this bill. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker."