20 July 2004

New Zealand On Sale To Highest Bidder

New Zealand First leader and MP for Tauranga, Rt Hon Winston Peters, says that the Government’s plans to relax rules on foreign investment in local companies will mean that an even higher proportion of the wealth generated in New Zealand will go overseas.

Mr Peters’ comments follow an announcement made by Finance Minister Michael Cullen this afternoon that the Government will double to $100 million the threshold at which transactions are scrutinised. It will also abolish the Overseas Investment Commission in a bid to relax rules on land sales and business purchases made by foreign investors.

“Direct foreign investment in this country now exceeds $50 billion and most of that is by way of straight takeover,” said Mr Peters.

“The Government is actually doing its best to facilitate and encourage foreign takeover by further weakening controls to the detriment of New Zealanders. The end result will be further annual drain of New Zealand-made profits overseas.

“Our railways, our banks, our forestry, oil, energy, insurance and telecommunications companies all have major overseas holdings or are overseas controlled.

“Nearly 50 percent of the New Zealand share market is overseas owned.

“The sad fact is that under Labour and National many of New Zealand’s best and most strategic assets have been sold for next to nothing. New Zealand doesn’t belong to New Zealanders anymore,” said Mr Peters.

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>