Brian Rudman: An inconvenient truth needs to be faced

Maurice Williamson. Photo / Hawke's Bay Today

You could hardly call Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson a soft-centred pinko on matters to do with race relations.

He sided with the red-necks of Whanganui, in refusing Maori pleas to restore the letter "h" to its rightful place in that city's name. He also backed the white settlers of Howick in opposing the Local Government Commission's plan to rename the area, for electoral purposes only, Te Irirangi.

So when Mr Williamson is moved to label critics of the sale of farmland to Chinese buyers "racist", you have to accept he's not just joking around. Even if his embarrassed boss, Prime Minister John Key, subsequently tried to laugh the accusation off as "Maurice ... having a strong sense of humour", and that "sometimes humour can backfire a little bit".

Luckily for the Government, just as the row seemed to be getting going, the Christchurch earthquake diverted everyone's attention. But what Mr Williamson said won't go away, if for no other reason than his opponents in the "Save The Farms Group" won't let it.

This group is demanding a moratorium on the sale of all agricultural land to foreigners, triggered into action by the attempt by Hong Kong-based Natural Dairy to buy the collapsed Crafar dairy farms empire. The 16 farms involved cover 7800ha in the central and western North Island. For the sale to go ahead, the minister has to give his official approval.

At Massey University last Thursday, BusinessDay reported Mr Williamson as saying that as the responsible minister, he couldn't discuss individual cases, but then observed that the general attitude to foreign investment was usually linked to the ethnicity of the buyer. He said "the number of New Zealanders who don't like the idea of foreign investment ... really sort of frightens me. A lot of it's more to do with racism.

"If you look different, you're a foreigner but if you come from the other side of the world, from Scotland, then you're not."

It's not the first time Mr Williamson has embarrassed his party masters by blurting out an unfortunate truth. His musings before the last election that Aucklanders wouldn't mind paying a $3 to $5 toll each way for the new Northern Motorway earned him not just time on the naughty chair, but ended any hope of being Transport Minister.

Mr Key has tried to remove ethnicity from the argument by suggesting this anti-foreigner attitude includes all outsiders. He said recently, "I don't think the wholesale selling of productive land to foreigners is in our best interests, irrelevant of whatever countries they come from."

Most of us would sympathise with this, but as Mr Williamson candidly noted, the issue only tends to rise to the top of the political agenda when the purchasers, as the minister says, "look different".

Even Mr Key's use of the emotive expression "wholesale selling" buys into this mood. The furore that surrounded the bid, by the exotic sheiks from Dubai, for a 23 per cent stake in Auckland Airport three years ago is a good example.

The Chinese bid for the Crafar farms has sparked off a $150,000 campaign by the Save The Farms Group - a collective of well-heeled Auckland businessmen, accountants and lawyers. But where were these protesters over the past five years when 150,248ha of agricultural land went into foreign ownership, most to foreigners from the United States, Italy and Britain, with Israelis and Australians close behind.

If I was one of the Hong Kong businessmen and knew that one million ha of land was already in foreign ownership - about 7 per cent of our commercially productive land area - I'd be thinking along the same lines as Mr Williamson.

The findings of the Government's review of the Overseas Investment Act which oversees the sale of land to foreigners was due to be released about the time the Crafar storm blew up. It's now on hold while the politicians search desperately for a policy.

For a country that as a result of Rogernomics has opened its economy - and citizenship - wide to anyone with a fistful of dollars, coming up with a formula for slowly, and non-ethnically, closing the gate is going to be an interesting exercise.

As Finance Minister Bill English pointed out the other day, Australians alone own $45 billion of assets in New Zealand, about 46 per cent of foreign investment. Will we target them first?

United States investors come second on $11.5 billion, with China way back with an estimated $1.9 billion.

More than 75 per cent of our pine plantations are in foreign hands, and around half the area in vines and 70 per cent of wine production. Most of our banks have long gone overseas, with a steady flow of manufacturing jobs.

Now, because a Hong Kong group has its eyes on a few dairy farms, the Kiwi way of life is suddenly said to be at risk. Mr Williamson worries out loud about what is driving the uproar. His conclusions could be right.