Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. The Green Party is pleased to support the Land Transfer Bill. As the chair of the Government Administration Committee the Hon Ruth Dyson has noted it has been a long time in coming. It was back in July 2010 that the Law Commission did a very thorough report about a new Land Transfer Act and yet it has taken all this time to actually get the legislation into the House.That said we are pleased to support it because it has gone through a good process in terms of the Law Commission review and quite substantial consultation and because it is taking legislation that is 60 years old and updating that for the modern era particularly given the electronic basis for the land register at the present time and the fact that the current Act is quite clumsy to administer. So it has been a process of modernisation. In that process we have of course retained the key principles at the core of our Torrens system: the indefeasibility of title the fact that land transactions cannot be made null and void the fact that they cannot be set aside unless there has been some fraudulent activity in gaining the title and the fact that it is a register of all interests in land and titles so that people can have confidence and be secure that when they are doing a land transaction they can go to the register and find all of the information there rather than having to search in other places. It does provide that security of ownership.There were changes made in terms of the High Court's ability and discretion to intervene in cases of obvious injustice and the ability to provide compensation but there is one huge hole in this legislation and that is around the issue of overseas ownership. Denis O'Rourke with his Supplementary Order Paper 325 proposed a significant change that would at least have had the register expanded to list transactions where there is an overseas person who ends up owning the land. That was a Supplementary Order Paper that the Green Party supported.What we are seeing in New Zealand is a significant increase in overseas ownership of land and we actually end up relying on a community organisation the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa for the best statistics on the alienation of New Zealand land. We have had a sharp increase in the proportion of shares listed on our sharemarket being overseas owned from 33 percent of listed shares in 2015 to 36 percent last year and we have had a significant increase in the amount of land that is overseas owned. In 2015 the Overseas Investment Office approved overseas investors buying nearly 80000 hectares of land yet in 2016—last year—the Overseas Investment Office approved the acquisition of 465863 hectares of rural land by overseas investors. The bulk of that was freehold land but some of it—about 100000 hectares—was leasehold land. The bulk of those transactions were where one overseas investor was selling to another. So once land has been alienated—once those high prices have been paid for farmland—it is very difficult for New Zealanders to buy it back. That 2016 figure of nearly 466000 hectares was just 1 year of land sales and that was 2.9 percent—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I will just remind the member that we are on a third reading. A third reading is the result of what transpired in the report back from the Committee of the whole House. I will just refer the member to Speakers' ruling 137/1 in particular. I will ask you to come back. To mention these other points is fine but you must come back and not make them what your comments are which is a substantive part of the speech.EUGENIE SAGE: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I would comment that about a third of the text of the bill is consequential amendments. One of the Acts that is amended by this bill is the Crown Pastoral Land Act. We have seen just recently that Mount White Station our second-largest Crown pastoral lease administered under the Crown Pastoral Land Act is unlikely to be able to be purchased by a New Zealand farmer in the same way that Jericho Station was not and potentially because it has been promoted aggressively overseas is to be bought by an overseas investor. This bill amends the Crown Pastoral Land Act but it provides no protection in that Act for our Crown pastoral leases—our magnificent high country stations—being alienated overseas.So it is this major gap in the bill that the Green Party—while supporting the rest of it around the Torrens system around indefeasibility of title and around the modernisation—thinks this bill should have addressed. Otherwise we will see an increasing proportion of land in New Zealand alienated overseas and unlike countries like Switzerland Canada the United States Argentina Thailand Japan and Ireland we do not have strong controls on overseas ownership. So we are supporting this bill but there is a big gap that the Green Party in Government would remedy by much tighter controls on overseas landownership.