The Government doesn't actually know how much New Zealand land is in foreign ownership, Finance Minister Bill English said today.While the Government review of the overseas investment regime aimed at stopping the sell-off of large tracts of land to foreig
The Government doesn't actually know how much New Zealand land is in foreign ownership, Finance Minister Bill English said today.
While the Government review of the overseas investment regime aimed at stopping the sell-off of large tracts of land to foreign buyers is yet to deliver, Mr English indicated the problem might not be a big as imagined.
Scant information meant it was hard to know, he told reporters today.
While it was known when foreign purchases were approved, how much land had been sold by foreigners was an unknown.
"The public debate would benefit from more information," Mr English said.
Interest in the issue has increased significantly since Hong Kong-based company Natural Dairy put in a bid to buy the large Crafar farm business. The Overseas Investment Office is yet to make a decision.
While debate raged over the possible sale of Crafar dairy farms to Chinese interests, in fact only a "tiny fraction" of the approvals come from countries outside the UK, the United States, France and the Netherlands.
"But on the other hand the approvals only show the approval for new purchases, they don't tell you whether foreign owners have been selling land.
"Anecdotally a lot of them come here, they buy the land, they figure out you can't make much money out of it and it's a long way to come and look at it, so they sell out and go.
"We're not even sure how much of our land is owned by foreign investors."
Four or five years ago there were large approvals of foreign ownerships, related to forestry blocks, but while blocks of land were coming up for sale and some overseas owners saw investment in New Zealand land as positive, the Crafar farms were the only sale in the pipeline, Mr English said.
The overseas investment review -- now overdue -- was "complex and ongoing", he said. Neither he nor Prime Minister John Key would today indicate when it might be delivered.
When launched more than a year ago, the review aimed to make changes so applications to the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) could be done quickly and look at the scope of the overseas investment screening regime -- for example whether screening thresholds which determine the sorts of land considered "sensitive" should be changed.
Following the first stage of the review, the process was simplified and application time fell from 63 days in August 2009 to 38 days over the last 10 months.
