The government set rules in place last year where residential housing can only be purchased by people living in New Zealand, Australia and, because of a quirk in the trade agreement, Singapore. Many of us breathed a sigh of relief because we would prefer New Zealand to be owned by New Zealanders. Some of us hoped that this government might extend these rules to include industrial and agricultural land so that New Zealand really will belong only to the people that live here.
Well, no. After a lot of farmland was sold to Chinese companies over the last decade, we are now faced with a new foreign buyer. The government, led by Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage, is going to allow the sale of land for forestry… to Japanese forestry companies, without the need to apply to the Overseas Investment Office.
Land Information Minister and Green MP Eugenie Sage has given a foreign-owned forestry company a free pass to buy thousands of hectares of New Zealand land without applying to the Overseas Investment Office (OIO).
Japanese-owned Pan Pac Forest Products was given the special approval to bypass the OIO to purchase land for forestry for the next three years as the government sought foreign forestry money to help meet its tree planting targets.
So much for getting Shane Jones’s nephs off the couch. Now, not only are we bringing in foreign workers to do the job that Kiwis should be doing, but we are allowing them to buy the land to do it.
The pre-approval was given to Pan Pac despite the Green Party having strongly protested land sales to foreigners and Forestry Minister Shane Jones saying he was sympathetic to rural concerns that converting productive farm land to forestry could cost jobs.
Associate Finance Minister David Clark signed off on Pan Pac’s pass, known as a ‘standing consent’, alongside Ms Sage.
The free pass allows Pan Pac to make 25 transactions involving 20,000ha of land and is valid until 2022.
Why are we talking about selling fertile agricultural land and converting it to forestry? Why would we do that when the south island, in particular, is awash with scrubland that could be converted to forestry easily without damaging our agriculture in any way?
What a bunch of hypocrites the Greens really are. They will do anything to kick farmers in the guts. They seem to forget that some farmers grow crops… like kale and mung beans, the staples of the average Greenie diet. Good luck with trying to eat pine trees, Eugenie.
Ms Sage defended the decision, saying Pan Pac had been in New Zealand since the 1970s, was a large exporter of quality timber and needed to secure its wood supply.
“They’ve got a long standing reputation in New Zealand. They’ve increased their investment here, they’ve got a strong workforce. We want to add value to our forestry exports not just have log exports and Pan Pac is a company that can do that.”
Yes… and all the profits go offshore, to Japan. Smart thinking, Eugenie, but like Jacinda, economics is not your strong point either.
My main question here is this. Wasn’t Shane Jones allocated $3 billion of taxpayers’ money, in the form of the Provincial Growth Fund, to develop a project that would see us plant 1 billion trees? So why is it that, instead of that, we are now selling land to foreign companies, without OIO approval, to plant some of those trees? What new madness is this?
The project to plant 1 billion trees was always an ambitious one, but it was intended to provide work in the regions and has been funded by taxpayers to do exactly that. Instead, we are selling more land to foreigners, reducing prime agricultural land to forestry and sending the profits overseas.
Yet another of the government’s promises is an abject failure, but in this case, we are sacrificing a valuable asset – prime agricultural land – on the altar of climate change.
Wow. What an enormous fail on the part of this government. They really know what they are doing, don’t they?