White Helen; O'Connor GregHELEN WHITE (Labour): Thank you for this opportunity to take a call. First of all to Damien Smith congratulations for getting your bill drawn. I think that you deserve the respect of knowing why we're not going to support it and why I'm not going to support it so I'm going to just go through that now for you. This is an issue about a regime which has been set up for good reason. As the Hon Julie Anne Genter has said land is of particular significance. You can't take back land that you sell elsewhere. So while I appreciate that it is often good to have investment in our country and I don't want to stop that entirely I do want to take it really seriously before that land is alienated from New Zealanders. So for me at the moment the Act actually is really doing a good job of striking that balance. It looks at that land and it looks at the sensitivity of it. It recognises that it is taonga and actually then it sets up a different threshold for people coming in from overseas. The problem with this bill that I see is that it lists a whole lot of countries as if it's suddenly somehow a good thing that they come in when in fact the focus of the test is not that. It's not about which country. It's about: is it a good thing that this land will be owned or alienated in these circumstances? So I think we've got the test right. I don't want it opened to a whole raft of countries in the OECD. But further I became concerned when I looked at the bill that it didn't actually restrict in the way it suggested it was going to anyway because there were so many ways around it. A company could set up in the OECD and suddenly there they would be from a different place. All sorts of people could structure around this and our land would be sold without the kind of actual thought and thought process that we have set up. I just cannot see that as being a good idea. So I don't accept that there are safeguards in this bill that stop that. I do think that what we have in place at the present time is not a broken system; I think it's a good system. I think it's a very sound way of approaching a problem but also an opportunity. I don't think it stops investment; it just simply makes people pause and think and re-evaluate and evaluate in the circumstances of that potential investment. There's obviously an issue with the free-trade agreement arrangements. There's also an issue with most favoured nation status. So those are the things that back up that. But basically it comes back to something really fundamental. This is sensitive land. This is important. It's interesting that even the member excludes residential land. There has been a lesson learnt there. But this is a situation where there's a lot more to it than that and I don't want to see farmers alienated in the way that they have been in the past. I don't want to see those kinds of things. I'm kind of surprised to see Nicola Grigg supporting the bill when in fact I know that she comes from a background with a long history in farming in New Zealand. I think those cultural things are really important. They're not just important to Māori; they're incredibly important to people who've been here and they've had a connection with the land and they don't want to lose it. So I'm not as severe in terms of the position as my friend Julie Anne Genter has been. I don't need to accuse anyone of rent seeking. I would question sometimes the value of that economic input because I don't think it's always as strong as it's made out by an ideological position that the ACT Party takes—I just don't think it is—but I do think what is very very important here is that we don't undermine a regime that has been set up for good reason. Lessons have been learnt and now they're consolidated in an Act and I don't want to see that actually alienate land from New Zealand. Thank you. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Todd Moller.