McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. Somewhat surprising—somewhat surprising—that I should be promoted to this far up the speaking list but I need to take a call on the Overseas Investment (Urgent Matters) Amendment Bill. It's the urgent part of a two-part process which I guess is designed to manage overseas investment in New Zealand because of I guess what's seen as an emergency and the potential for New Zealand businesses to be worth much less than they may otherwise have been and consequently for overseas investors to pick up a few snips in New Zealand that we're not particularly keen on. That part of the bill I can understand and I do think that we need to have some controls over some of these things. But we've got to remember in the course of putting these controls in place that we're really interfering to some extent in a property right or a right of people to trade their businesses that they've grown and built as they see fit. I think that is a little challenging. I do see the reasons as I explained a minute ago for the bill but I do think that the process we put this through is risky and it creates some risk which I will go into as well before I get on to talk about some things I want to talk about with respect to the submitters. I think that one of the things that always worries me about scrutiny of business is the potential for I suppose what you might nicely term leakage. In other words unless the system is extremely secure there's potential for I suppose leakage of intellectual property and things like that. In other words people can obtain information about businesses that they shouldn't necessarily be able to do. The scrutiny of this process is undertaken across a number of Government departments and the more people you have involved in the scrutiny of these things the less secure they become. That was one of the things that worried me about the discussions we had—the very brief discussions we had—in the course of the select committee process on this bill. I think that that's an issue that I think will be of concern to many as this process is undertaken. There's no telling of course how often this process will be used and it is a bill that's going to be reviewed so its term may not last for long. It may not be required to intervene that often. The other thing that concerns me significantly about this bill is it deals with all businesses—it doesn't matter whether they're worth a dollar or a billion dollars. So everybody goes through this process. Now as a previous speaker said it does simplify some of the processes that are required to get to this point. None the less it's going to be costly. These things always cost money no matter how easy it's surmised they might be. One of the things that always intrigues me about bills is why people submit. One of the interesting things about this bill was that four legal firms submitted on it. You can only surmise that they've submitted on it with a great deal of interest. In fact their submissions were very useful but the really interesting thing about them is that they stand to get a lot of work out of this and so I imagine they would be very interested in the process that this bill goes through to get it to the other side as it progresses through the House. So we didn't have a lot of submitters but we did as I said have four law firms and we had a couple of other property companies who had specific interests in—well not interests they had specific reasons for submitting. Their submissions as Andrew Bayly explained a minute ago were constructive as well. The other thing that intrigued me about the submissions was the submission of the New Zealand Initiative. It pointed out some of the issues that I touched on a little earlier where I mentioned the nervousness that I had about the fact that this bill has the potential to delve deeply into effectively private businesses. Now clearly there are some businesses in New Zealand that have significant national interest and the people and organisations that have got those businesses going probably understand this situation and understand how important they are to New Zealand. So there is a need for that to be considered in the course of the bill. I just want to mention a couple of other things that have always interested me a bit about business in New Zealand. Being from the Manawatū or Rangitīkei we've had a number of historic businesses in the Rangitīkei that have disappeared out of the country basically. One of the most notable recent ones being Allflex which is the international animal identification company bought by a French company. It has an office still in Palmerston North but pretty much disappeared overseas. I'm not saying that it might have been a snip when it was bought or bought cheaply but none the less that's the type of risk this bill is trying to overcome. The other business of significant note in Palmerston North that was taken—there'd be a number of them actually—was a company called Glaxo which was the very first I guess pharmaceutical company based on the milk industry. Of course that company is still going all round the world under a different name now. That emphasises the reasons why this bill is being brought to the House but it doesn't overcome—or just because there's good reason for bringing it to the House it doesn't mean that we've effectively solved the problem and the risks that this bill poses and those risks as I've said are particularly a cost. The fact that we need to encourage overseas investment in New Zealand—because frankly we don't have enough capital in this country to make us go round and we're going to find that out very shortly with the $50 billion - odd worth of bills we're building up for future generations right now. So we always have a need for foreign investment in New Zealand just simply because we don't have enough cash to go round.This bill doesn't stop it. In fact I think it will to some extent encourage foreign investment because it will make some processes easier but none the less it makes a lot of them more difficult and also I think puts people off going through these processes because we've seen with some of our overseas investment rules in the last couple of years where effectively it has frightened foreign investment away from New Zealand. Now that's a political decision that rightly or wrongly has been made.I won't go on for any longer—or not much longer—but I do think that as I said earlier there are good reasons and others for this bill. We can't support it as a party for the reasons that I've outlined and certainly the reasons that Mr Bayly outlined earlier and I'm sure the speakers that follow me will pick up on many of the points that I've left out of it. So that's my lot. Thank you.