Parker David: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5380. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I rise to take a call in respect of the trade estimates. There are two issues that I want to address. The first issue is in respect of the sheep saga which was traversed a little at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee and as members who were there will know the National Government members did their best to stop us inquiring into that. They gave the Minister the Hon Murray McCully the opportunity to explain things from his perspective and to try to cover his tracks and then they stopped us from inquiring into itproperly. This is part of the orchestrated cover up that we have had from the Government in respect of the Saudi sheep saga. Even now we and just about every media organisation in New Zealand have outstanding Official Information Act requests that have been routinely ignored in breach of the Act by all of the ministries—by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade by the Ministry for Primary Industries by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and by Treasury. They have all gone to the end of the statutory period and have then all claimed that they need more time. Then Treasury had the audacity to say that it was going to have a proactive release some time in the distant future.At the heart of this is the fact that the Government has been caught acting unscrupulously. It has wasted more than $6 million on a farm in the desert where most of the lambs died. The Minister for Primary Industries Nathan Guy said he thought that it might have been because of a sand storm which is rather ironic given that the farm advisers say it was more likely to have been a rain event which is itself ironic given that the sheep are under shelter. That waste of $6 million is less unprincipled than the $4 million facilitation payment that the Government paid unnecessarily in order to settle what it says was some threatened legal claim which we now know was never threatened. There has never been any legal advice that we have been able to see that says there was any legal risk to be settled. It was a facilitation payment paid to the Al-Khalaf Group—a $4 million upfront payment that was hidden for a number of years and that has still not been properly explained by Mr McCully.As if that was not bad enough we have also had the South Korea free-trade agreement which makes some important advances in terms of tariff reductions for New Zealand and therefore is good for our traders. But again we had to drag out from the Government and from officials the truth that the South Korea free-trade agreement contains a limitation on a future New Zealand Government extending the sorts of categories of investment that are screened for—i.e. you can screen for existing categories of investment like farms but you cannot add a new category of screening like banning the purchase of houses. It is almost unbelievable that the Government could be so inept as to get this wrong in respect of the South Korea free-trade agreement because the recent South Korea free-trade agreement with Australia permits just that: the banning of the sale of houses to South Koreans. So why this Government was so negligent as to trade the sovereignty of a future Government being able to do that I do not know.As if that was not bad enough we have then had denial after denial in this House where the Minister of Trade has refused to answer questions as to whether the same mistake is being made in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They have insulted the intelligence of this House by refusing to answer questions when exactly the same questions were answered by Minister Groser on The Nation and on Q+A at the weekend and then by the Prime Minister on Q+A on Sunday. It is a disgraceful thing. Lots of my forebears came to New Zealand to escape absentee landlords and yet that is what this Government is allowing to happen in New Zealand. The richest 1 percent in the world from overseas countries who want to put their money beyond the reach of their authorities or to spread their investments or who think that New Zealand is a safe place to put their money can outbid New Zealanders can push up house prices and can exclude New Zealanders from owning one house in their own country.We have seen a documentary in Australia of the problems that it is having in respect of farmland purchases at the moment; another area where this Government allows overly permissive rules. This Government pretended after the Shanghai Pengxin transaction that it was tightening the rules and then it sent a side letter to the Overseas Investment Office telling it to look felicitously or to approve applications for up to 10 times the size of the average farm unit.