Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. National will be opposing this piece of legislation; it's another piece of legislation in regard to overseas investment. Just for the benefit of listeners to Parliament or viewers of Parliament what we're talking about here is our overseas investment regime. New Zealand actually has one of the most restrictive regimes when it comes to allowing people from around the world to come and invest in New Zealand.Hon David Parker: Only for land.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well for land. So New Zealanders across the board do have a concern about our landholdings and our farms so a regime has been put in place to clear or scrutinise and have an assessment about sensitive land in New Zealand for some time. It is quite restrictive and there are benefits for it and challenges around it.It also has included large businesses in the past over $100 million. This Government has been I think it's fair to say critical or generally sceptical about foreign investment—Winston Peters and New Zealand First particularly so; Labour a little bit less so but they brought in extra restrictions around purchases of houses and properties. This is another piece of legislation in that vein which is about having a notification regime for any foreign investment in businesses in New Zealand where the ownership of that business has changed substantially. People might say Well that's all very well and good." but the challenge with it is that it makes it more difficult for New Zealand businesses to get access to the capital that they need to survive and to provide jobs for New Zealanders.So right now here we are in the middle of a very substantial recession. The Reserve Bank yesterday talked about the sharpest decline in GDP growth in 160 years—now I don't know how they came up with that exact figure but that's what they have suggested. We've had news this morning about the fact that New Zealand's losing more than 1000 jobs a day 37000 jobs in April and many more job losses are predicted. Many small businesses and large businesses will collapse. Now that is an inevitable consequence of the shutting of the economy for two months for COVID-19 and the continued restrictions now. So the only relevant questions are: are we making it worse than we need to be and how do we get out of it?In terms of making it worse than we need to be extending the lockdown is part of that but in terms of getting out of it we're going to rely on investment because it's only investment that allows businesses to hire people rebuild regrow and regenerate their businesses. If we rely just on domestic savings that's fine but we'll grow slower; if we want to grow more quickly we import capital and equity from offshore as we have for the entire history of this country since the Treaty or before. That's how you get growth: you bring in the money and skills of people from around the world. That is going to be absolutely critical right now as New Zealand businesses seek to survive rebuild and grow. So this legislation is actually going to make that more difficult and that's why we don't support it.Now there are elements of this that we do support. There is a sentiment behind a number of issues that we're quite happy with; it's the extent of it that we are concerned about. So there are three critical things in this piece of legislation. The first relates to bringing in a national interest test so that investments will be screened on that basis for something that might be against the national interest. Now we support that in so far as it extends to matters relating directly to national security and for things that could have a potential military use. I think there is an interest in looking at that but the looseness of the definition of "national interest" is such that we can't support what is specifically proposed here.Secondly it brings in a ministerial power to call in applications directly in a political sense. We worry about that—we worry about that in the hands of David Parker who has been hostile to a lot of investment the most latest one was a powerplant on a river in the South Island which he opposed on the grounds that it would frustrate a very small number of kayakers for example. Then we could have had the Greens Minister Eugenie Sage doing it and she is hostile—I don't think I exaggerate—to just about everything when it comes to investment in business; anything involving mining or natural resources she's implacably opposed to. So putting any powers in the hands of Ministers such as her would be very difficult for any advancement in this country.The third part of it is this notification regime so that any investment no matter how small if it changes the ownership—so as we talked about the pie shop owner in Taumarunui may be on their knees at the moment because Ian McKelvie is on a diet he is not eating pies as much as he used to and the general area is struggling. That business if it was about to fall over—it may well be that the sister-in-law of the owner lives offshore and wants to contribute some equity to make it better. There will be thousands of similar examples all around the country right now and now they have to apply and go through an overseas investment notification regime then 10 days it may be another 30 days then they've got to fill out forms get lawyers and get accountants—it's a difficult and uncertain process.The net outcome of that is that it would add costs to everybody it would add costs to the people who are doing it it would add uncertainty and it creates official costs because you've got to have an army of officials going through all these things. We don't have any idea how many applications there might be. Nobody has any idea how many—you know 500000 small business might be looking at this sort of thing; we've got no idea how long it would take. So that adds a lot of costs but it's more the signal that it shows that New Zealand is a closed shop when it comes to that foreign investment.So we argue that yes you know there is something about this at the big end if we've got a time—extreme emergency with COVID-19 and there may be some major companies of value to New Zealand that are at very low prices. There is concern particularly about State-owned enterprises offshore with perhaps even opaque ownership structures swooping in and picking things up; OK I can understand that but I think there needs to be a practical threshold. The current threshold is $100 million before you start—it could be lower than that but you know $5 million $10 million or something like that which will free up by far the large majority of potential transactions.The Minister stands up and says "Oh well but Stuff was sold for $1 so we're going to have to have a regime that includes everybody." Well it's perfectly I'm sure within the wit even of that Minister to come up with some kind of threshold that talks about annual revenue or the number of staff employed or businesses of national significance such as national media organisations or something like that. He could have come up with a threshold that would have meant that most businesses can be left alone to get the equity they need to survive and to maintain employment in this country and to save jobs without introducing this cumbersome thing which makes it more difficult for New Zealanders to get access to the capital that they need.We're hearing a lot about making it easier for New Zealanders to get access to debt and the Government's got all these various schemes more debt but most businesses as well as debt actually prefer to have equity: equity investments which is people putting their money in part-ownership of the businesses. Foreign investment is critical to growing this economy in terms of growing faster but also bringing skills connections with the country with which the money has come from and access to markets—there is long long literature about the importance of it. I think it's very ill timed for the small-minded protectionist inward-looking view of New Zealand First to dominate our economic thinking at a time when we desperately need investment to grow this economy and get back on our feet. So on that basis we oppose this bill. Thank you."