Twyford PhilPHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): I appreciate the comments from the Minister in the chair Christopher Finlayson but notwithstanding his opinion about the Supplementary Order Paper of Denis O'Rourke Supplementary Order Paper 325 which would insert a new clause 9A—notwithstanding the Minister's view that that is out of scope of this bill I want to express Labour's support for this amendment. It deals with a problem that has been the subject of much contentious debate in this Parliament and out in the public sphere over the last few years as the housing crisis has got worse and worse. It is our view on this side of the Chamber that unchecked demand pressures are causing real problems in the housing market. By no means the biggest pressure but still a significant one is the lack of regulation or lack of limits around foreign investment in the residential real estate market. Denis O'Rourke's amendment seeks to fix one aspect of this problem by inserting in Part 2 in new clause 9A the requirement for the registrar to keep a foreign ownership of land register. This is basically the policy in Australia and in the UK so it is a very sensible mainstream proposal. What it would do is establish a transparent register of foreign ownership that would include the person's name and nationality the amount and value of the land involved and the districts in which the land is situated.What is the problem it is trying to solve? The problem has been a terrible dearth of reliable information about foreign ownership of land. In the case of residential land the Government has stepped into the vacuum over the last year or two by having Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) run a survey of people buying residential property. It has only recently released the sixth quarterly report of that Land Information New Zealand data. It purports to provide summary information about the extent of foreign buying in the residential real estate market but on the sixth go it is still having real problems generating any kind of data that sheds useful light on this issue. In the most recent one it tidied up one of the longstanding problems with the data and that is that it was treating people who are in New Zealand and buying homes while on either a temporary student visa or a temporary work visa as New Zealanders which obviously made kind of a mockery of the numbers.But in the most recent instalment of LINZ data it still included trusts and companies—automatically treating them all as if they were New Zealand residents buying residential property. So you could only conclude from the most recent batch of data that was released that foreign buyers in the residential real estate market were somewhere between 4 percent which was the absolute number that the data could confirm and 22 percent given that a large number of the non-resident foreign buyers buying homes in New Zealand are using trusts and company structures. So I say all that by way of just saying that this is the problem. It is a real problem—the lack of data. It is a matter of huge public interest. There is very very strong public support for the idea of putting limits and controls around foreign investment in real estate as they do in Australia Hong Kong Singapore and British Colombia in Canada most recently. What this would do is provide a source of really good reliable information in real time about the presence of foreign ownership—in fact not only in terms of residential property but property more generally. This would be overwhelmingly popular with New Zealanders this initiative. It is sensible it would provide good data to support public policy and Labour will support Denis O'Rourke's amendment.