John Minto
I was amused by a comment a few days ago by Prime Minister John Key, who expressed concern at foreign ownership of New Zealand farms.
Key spoke generally but it was in the context of public angst at attempts by Chinese investors to buy the 16 farms in the failed Crafar empire. He would not discuss that particular sale but did say "I'd hate to see New Zealanders as tenants in their own country and that is a risk, I think, if we sell out our entire productive base."
Key was responding to a degree of xenophobia in the community, which has shown little concern at land and buildings being bought up by the likes of Australian interests ($80 billion in Kiwi assets are owned by Australian interests to date) or European buyers but has baulked at Chinese buyers of our productive base. Predictably it's an issue on which Winston Peters is trying to regenerate political support.
It's been a lacklustre debate so far with the most important elements missing from the discussion. First, there is a huge and growing proportion of New Zealanders who are already just tenants in their own country. Those on low and middle incomes typically do not own their own homes or have assets beyond the clothes they wear, a cellphone, car and TV set. They get by (or increasingly don't get by) from payday to payday. The share they have in the economy is based on government ownership of key infrastructure but as Labour and National have privatised most of the economy, this growing group of Kiwis are increasingly sidelined to the economic margins.
There can be no argument that the gap is growing between the haves and have-nots and that this occurs as a direct result of government economic policies. Tax cuts for the rich and GST increases in the latest Budget continue the trend.
Labour and National are running policies for our increasingly foreign economic landlords while life for the existing tenants gets tougher. One of the arguments in favour of Kiwisaver was that this would finally give these New Zealanders a share in the economy. They could become mini-capitalists as their savings were used to buy shares in the casino known as the sharemarket. But we all know this is just pretence.
The second missing element in the debate is the danger of the country selling off assets to foreign corporations. At the level of basic employment this doesn't mean much. For New Zealanders in the private sector with incomes based solely on wages or salaries it matters less who owns the company they work for. New Zealand capitalists are no better employers than foreign-owned corporations. Our hotels chains, for example, regularly change hands in deals done in boardrooms around the world but the cleaning, cooking and servicing jobs remain unchanged - except for the incessant corporate drive for everyone to work harder so the bottom line for the non-working shareholders can improve.
But strategically it means a great deal. The wider economic threat from foreign ownership is what Murray Horton of CAFCA (Campaign against foreign control of Aotearoa) calls economic imperialism. In opposition to foreign takeover and control of our economy, Horton says "We're anti-imperialists - and in this case we're targeting foreign corporations."
It should be of serious interest to us that most other countries have much tighter controls over foreign investment than New Zealand. No Kiwi company can buy land in China, for example. It can be leased but not bought.
However, neo-liberal New Zealand governments have put up the For Sale signs and our most lucrative businesses and assets have been bought already. Our farms are the next big thing...
One media report shows that already foreign owners have bought into more than 150,000 hectares of New Zealand farmland - almost the size of Stewart Island - in the past five years.
There is the desperate need for a decent discussion about the dangers of this wholesale land-grab but New Zealanders are still asleep.
