Will foreign enterprises display the cultural sensitivity and awareness that are required and appropriate in today's Aotearoa/New Zealand?
Will foreign enterprises display the cultural sensitivity and awareness that are required and appropriate in today's Aotearoa/New Zealand?
Opinion by
By Bryan Gould
COMMENT:
To express concern about foreign ownership and control in New Zealand is often to invite accusations of xenophobia and economic illiteracy. It is worthwhile, therefore, to rehearse the grounds for that concern.
The most obvious manifestation of foreign influence is the sale of New Zealandassets to foreign interests, as in the case of the proposed sale of Westland Dairy Cooperative to the Chinese dairy giant, Yili. Such a change of ownership inevitably means some loss of economic benefit.
When a New Zealand asset is sold to overseas interests, the economic benefits produced by that asset - the income stream, the capital appreciation, the technological know-how, and so on - flow offshore rather than remain in New Zealand, and the strategic direction of the industry in which the asset operates can be changed to our disadvantage.
The consequences of such developments and of the repatriation of profits to foreign owners across the exchanges is that we are a smaller and less wealthy economy than we would otherwise be, and have greater difficulty in exercising control over our strategic direction and in balancing our overseas payments - which becomes, in turn, an inhibitor of future growth.
We should also take account of assets which have other than a purely monetary value.
Foreign companies that bottle our water for export to profitable markets overseas, for example, exploit an asset to which we do not attach a market price but, in a world when clean water is increasingly scarce, to allow its consumption by overseas profit-seekers is short-sighted in the extreme.
The Australian ownership of our major commercial banks and the repatriation across the Tasman of their multi-billion profits represents a further loss of national wealth and a further burden on our balance of payments.
And, given the important role played by banks in our overall economic development, their Australian parentage means that essential elements in the economic management of our own economy are in some senses beyond our control, since the significant decisions taken by our banks will reflect Australian interests rather our own.
Foreign companies that bottle our water for export to profitable markets overseas exploit an asset even though we do not attach a market price to it. Photo / File
So, our own Government - however much it may want to see that bank policies on interest rates, mortgage policies, and monetary policy more generally, reflect New Zealand priorities - is saddled with important agencies whose primary loyalty is to their Australian owners.
There are other examples of foreign entities, by virtue of their significant involvement in our economy, being able to influence domestic policy to suit their own interests.
We need only recall the demand made by Warner Brothers some years back that the influence of trade unions in the film industry should be reduced, and the shameful readiness of the then National government to accede to that demand by changing our labour laws so that film industry workers became self-employed contractors rather than employees, to understand how vulnerable we can be to powerful overseas interests.
There is a further, and important, instance of potential damage if we allow foreign interests to become too powerful. No one doubts that one of the most formidable obstacles to effective protection of our vulnerable environment is the primacy we accord to profit-seeking enterprises and commercial interests more generally.
How much more significant does this consideration become if the commercial interests involved are foreign, rather than New Zealand-owned? How much more likely is it that environmental downsides will be discounted if the oil company seeking permits to drill in our coastal waters is answerable only to foreign shareholders rather than to the New Zealand public?
A truly sovereign country will legitimately want to limit the influence of those who seek to play a significant role in our national life but are based overseas.
And will foreign enterprises display the cultural sensitivity and awareness that are required and appropriate in today's Aotearoa/New Zealand? Will they understand the value we place on the bicultural and multi-cultural dimensions of life in our country or on the social and workplace advances we have made, often ahead of the rest of the world?
A truly sovereign country will legitimately want to limit the influence of those who seek to play a significant role in our national life but are based overseas - especially when that role that might have deleterious consequences not just for our economy, as measured in dollar terms, but also for our national identity, our social cohesion and our environment.
Bryan Gould is an ex-British MP and Waikato University vice-chancellor
