Tirikatene RinoRINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. I'm delighted to take a call in this third reading of the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill (No 3). I note that a certain party of two in this House have chosen not to participate in this debate so I'm more than delighted to take this opportunity to support this bill and support the good work of this Government in progressing and improving our overseas investment regime. That's what this bill is about: the leadership of the Hon David Parker with our Government ensuring that we have a COVID recovery that is boosting our economy and ensuring that particularly our productive sectors maintain their competitive edge internationally and can be a productive sustainable and an inclusive economy.Just today just as an example I was driving through my vast electorate of Te Tai Tonga an area which—Hon Gerry Brownlee: Which bit?RINO TIRIKATENE: —the Hon Gerry Brownlee would know well. The beautiful Canterbury Plains Kā Pākihi Whakatekateka o Waitaha. As I was driving all the way from Christchurch down to Timaru—mighty Timaru—just the vast landscapes that we have there. Productive world-leading arable farming landscapes farming systems world-leading systems whether it be in dairy—some wonderful dairy processing facilities dotted throughout the landscape as we go. I could go on and on through the great island of Te Waipounamu to the West Coast to Southland to Otago. We know how important our taonga lands are to us as a country to maintaining our competitive advantage and earning a living in this very dynamic and challenging world that we live in in this COVID environment so overseas investment is critical to our economy. This bill makes a number of very welcome changes to ensure that we are protecting our taonga especially and I know this is very dear to Māori up and down the country. Mind you Māori in general are very welcoming of overseas investment. We have been so since the Treaty. Since before the Treaty we were very welcoming. It was just unfortunate that once we did sign the Treaty things did sort of go awry somewhat. But overseas investment has always been necessary for our economy. It has always been necessary to improve the productivity right across our productive sectors especially and we have overseas investment happening every day and in every sphere of our economy. Whether it's in the tech space or our businesses being purchased and interest in businesses being bought and sold there are investments happening across the board but we want to ensure through this bill that we do protect our taonga—productive land. Therefore ensuring that the directive which the Minister gave to the Overseas Investment Office we are codifying that into legislation to ensure that there has to be a demonstrable boost and productive improvement to those land assets to ensure that the investment is justified. So it's a very high bar now that applicants have to meet and that is very welcome because we want to ensure—and I certainly do as I continue to drive around the great big island—that we maintain our sovereignty as Kiwis but we also welcome that investment that will help to enhance and grow the wealth of our provinces and our region and our nation as a whole. There are also a number of very helpful improvements through this bill. I want to acknowledge the Finance and Expenditure Committee for all their helpful contributions that they made in their consideration of this bill. Some very helpful improvements have been made to ensure that those applications which do meet the tests and which are going to add and enhance our businesses and their profitability and their productivity—those applications will have an easier time to ensure that they can get processed quicker and there's a whole host a suite of sensible improvements in that regard. So on the whole this is an excellent piece of legislation. I thank the members and the parties for their support of this bill. This is once again ensuring that we can continue our COVID recovery and boost our economy. Kia ora tātou.