Browning Steffan: Overseas Investment (Restriction on Foreign Ownership of Land) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Browning Steffan: Overseas Investment (Restriction on Foreign Ownership of Land) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 15 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4421. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
STEFFAN BROWNING (Green) 
: 
 At the cut-off point I was pointing out that Governments around the world are buying up land to protect their national interests. We too should be protecting our national interests. It is not in New Zealand’s long-term strategic economic interests to approve large-scale purchases of our farmland to overseas buyers. Our land is the goose that lays the golden egg. We should sell golden eggs to the world but we should not sell the goose to the world or our goose will be cooked. 
This bill is about protecting family farmers in New Zealand. Small and medium sized New Zealand farmers are being priced out of the market by overseas buyers who purchase our farms. Overseas buyers looking to get a foothold in New Zealand can and do outbid local farmers. Shanghai Pengxin outbid Landcorp and Michael Fay’s group in the process driving up the price of rural land with the only beneficiaries being the Australian banks that had lent the Crafars the money. Those farmers who want to sell out love overseas buyers because they drive up the price but the long-term effect is to drive out family farmers and replace them with overseas corporations. Those who care about the long-term future of family farming in New Zealand will support this bill. It is about keeping families on the land. 
This bill is about cleaning up New Zealand’s shambolic and confusing system for approving overseas land sale applications. Currently the Overseas Investment Office is supposed to make a dispassionate assessment of whether applications by overseas persons to buy New Zealand land meet the tests set out in the Overseas Investment Act. In fact the Overseas Investment Office does no such thing. The Overseas Investment Office is a rubber stamp for approving the applications because that is what successive Governments have expected of it—nothing less. 
As the High Court recently found in the judicial review of the Overseas Investment Office’s handling of the Crafar farms application the Overseas Investment Office is not applying the law correctly. It is applying it in a way so that it can approve the applications. Figures released to the Green Party show that over the last few years the Overseas Investment Office has approved virtually all applications by foreign investors to buy sensitive land. But even so it is a confusing system. This bill makes it crystal clear with a clear guideline that sensitive New Zealand land is for New Zealand citizens permanent residents and New Zealand corporate entities. 
Technically what this bill does is use the existing definition of “sensitive land” in the Overseas Investment Act and then ensures that such land cannot be purchased by those defined as “overseas persons” by the Overseas Investment Act. “Sensitive land” is defined as farmland over 5 hectares in area or land greater than 0.4 hectares on an island or land greater than 0.2 hectares on the foreshore and some other specialist definitions. “Overseas person” is defined as someone who is not a New Zealand citizen or ordinary resident of New Zealand and for companies the definition is a company incorporated overseas or which is more than 25 percent owned offshore. 
Let us protect our strategic economic interests. Let us protect our family farmers. Let us clean up our overseas ownership rules. Let us keep ownership of the golden goose. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.