Cunliffe David: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCunliffe David: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10709. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn): I acknowledge Ian McKelvie the member who has just returned to his seat and I acknowledge the hard-working Kiwis who are out there in our primary sector every day doing their work and ensuring our country moves forward.Mr McKelvie mentioned Silver Fern Farms and I am glad that he did because the 82 percent who voted in favour of that merger we will call it—what is of issue is whether they voted so based on accurate information and whether the Overseas Investment Office also had accurate information and had done due diligence. I think that is it is fair to say an issue that we will be returning to in weeks to come. The member opposite has rightly noted that land information is part of the review for us today and of course the land information portfolio takes in the Overseas Investment Office which has been much in the news of late and not for good reasons.Our primary sector as with the rest of New Zealand faces a choice. Are we going to be simply a hard-working producer of relatively raw materials where we do not get very much share of wallet or are we going to add value and knowledge and are we going to be world-beaters for premium products that we can put on restaurant tables and shelves around the world? If it is the latter then we are going to need several things. We are going to need knowledge and information all the way along that value chain from the farm to the table and we are going to need high-quality investment along the way—high-quality investment.The Labour Party is in favour of having high-quality foreign investment in New Zealand business. We believe we should be international traders. We believe that we should be out there in the world but not in a stupid way.That brings me back to the Overseas Investment Office because today it has—by the Minister for Land Information’s own admission—been the case that the Overseas Investment Office got it badly wrong in the case of a sheep and beef station in North Taranaki called Onetai Station where it did not properly do a due diligence test on the foreign investors who were buying it. This station is alongside a sensitive riverway in Taranaki and the guys who bought it just happen to have criminal prosecutions in their background for toxic dumping into their local river before they bought the Taranaki station—not ideal.What is worse is that in the first place our watchdog the Overseas Investment Office which New Zealanders depend upon to keep our country safe from investors of ill repute relied upon them saying they were clean. The office tried to do a quick Google search but according to documents that we have seen it did not find anything. That is why in the review that the Minister has belatedly announced today the terms of reference include helping the Overseas Investment Office to find someone who can actually work Google. That is extraordinary. New Zealand’s official watchdog of investment quality into our primary sector could not find criminal convictions that the Labour Party took 30 minutes to find—30 minutes to find. And if it is true of that case how many other cases are sitting in the Minister’s problem pile? I will bet you this. The Minister would not opt for a full external review if she thought everything in that box was hunky-dory and in the farm language that is around out there in this sector I would say “Bugger!”.Something is very wrong in the Overseas Investment Office and it is going to take members across both sides of this House to fix it. We want good trade. We want our primary sector to move forward. We want high-quality foreign investment that will add skills knowledge distribution chains and market access but what we do not want is sensitive New Zealand land sold off without so much as a wet bus ticket to people who actually do not have the credentials that they are required to have under our New Zealand law. That is sloppy. That is not appropriate. That is not doing justice to the hard-working farming people up and down New Zealand who get up every morning and work their guts out to make a decent living. It is not honouring them to allow their land to be bought up by people who may or may not have been fully frank about their criminal records when they made those investments. [Bell rung] Mr Chairman.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): The Hon David Cunliffe.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: If people out there in New Zealand think that this is an isolated case then I think that the Labour Opposition has news for them. This is a system failure. Where does this go now? Where it goes is very simple. The Onetai Station scandal is the tip of an iceberg. It is one of many approvals that the current Government let past the goalie over the last 5 years. Do you know that only one overseas investment application into New Zealand farmland has been turned down in the last 5 years? Only one.Tracey Martin: Unbelievable.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: “Unbelievable.” my colleague says. Unbelievable—only one. That was Lochinver Station—the Crafar farms—and that was after weeks and weeks and weeks of media attention and of Opposition work and only then reluctantly did Ministers say: “Oh it’s too hard.” But the Overseas Investment Office probably would have ticked it off just like it ticked off every other application without exception during the period. Why? Is it that it thinks that it is appropriate to rely upon a statutory declaration—the word of investors who may or may not have come through shell companies run by Mossack Fonseca and others? Does it think that that is good enough for New Zealanders? Does it think that it is OK to do a 5-minute Google search find nothing and say that it has done its job? Or is it more sinister?Is it possibly the fact that the current Government is so intent on keeping the tap of cash open that it does not really care where it comes from? Could it be the case that the National Government is more intent on looking after the interests of the powerful—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Order!Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: —and the moneyed—