 And perhaps as a result of sticking their finger up into the political win the Labour parties decided they want to limit the discretion of ministers when it comes to overseas interests buying up rural land, under the new policy foreign investors would be prevented from buying rural land unless they can promise an increase in exports or substantial jobs. How this of course was sparked by the scrap over the crafe of farm and David Shearer, the Labour leader, is with us. Good morning. Good morning. This is political opportunism at the worst sort, isn't it? No, I think it's actually getting behind what I believe one New Zealander's want and what's good actually for New Zealand is that keep valuable farmland in the hands of New Zealanders who are the best farmers in the world and only sell it to foreigners if there's really demonstrated benefits to New Zealand in terms of, as you said, exports to New Zealand or new technologies. You sold land at twice the rate it's currently been sold at when you were last in office, why the change of mind? Because I think you need to draw a line on the sand and I believe that the demand for New Zealand land can only grow. We know that there's about 41 different applications for land currently before the overseas investment office and about 16,000 hectares are being considered at the moment. So that demand is going to grow and I think we have to make a stand and say, look, what's the best interest for New Zealand and we should be acting in those interests. If you promise but don't deliver, in other words, to the foreigners, there's plenty of jobs or whatever and they don't deliver then what? Well, they'd have to be, first of all, you'd have to go through a pretty rigorous test before you could actually get that agreement to go through. So I think in the sense there would be an agreement to say that you would be able to promise to do that. And if there wasn't, we would have to have some form of penalty in order to make sure that that was delivered. Exactly, that's what I'm asking. What's the penalty? What do you do? Well, I think that's what we need to talk through. I'd hope that this bill would go through to the select committee where we can actually have a number of people come forward and look at it. So you don't have that in mind yet? You've just come up with this and you hope it will be pulled out and then you'll work it out as you go along? No, what we said was that there was going to have to be a test and if you go against and that test would sit and it would be a rigorous test. But you don't know what the test is? No, well the test has to be a substantial number of jobs and exports. Yeah, but if they fail the test you don't know what the penalty is. Yeah, they would have to perhaps give up the land that they had bought. So you would take them to court to force them to give up the land? We would have to look at what the penalty would need to be but they would have to be in agreement. If you're coming into by land in New Zealand and you're saying that you're going to do certain things and then you don't do them, you're violating your agreement and that would of course have penalties attached to it. What if the farmer goes to sell the land and no one locally wants to buy it except for a foreigner? What does that farmer do? Well, that could be taken into consideration I guess in that particular case but I don't see too many situations like that where I'm at. Well, the Crave for Farm is exactly that. Well, no, it's not actually. There was a group of farmers who were indeed interested in buying that land and didn't really have a chance. And not at the right price? Well, the price, let's take a really good look at this because the price that they were putting up was reflective of what New Zealanders could pay. Now if foreigners come in and they can get their finance at 1% interest rate and we're paying 6% interest rate, it's not exactly a level playing field either. So that's your message to the farmer. If you're selling your farm for a million dollars and the local guy can pay you 800 but the Chinese guy can pay you a million you've got to sell it for 800,000. You've just killed the value of land in this country by doing that. No, you haven't killed the value of land. What you have done is making sure that New Zealanders keep a hold of the land rather than the flow of the land. At the expense of the land owner who's just lost 200,000 dollars? Well, in this case, in Crafer farms, the extra money was not actually going to Crafer or anybody else it was actually going to banks that lent Crafer way too much money. Indeed, because the local who owned the farm couldn't run them properly. Well, also because the banks lent him way too much money and overlapped. But that's got nothing to do with foreign ownership. In the Crafer case, they got 200 million dollars, the local bid was 170. So what you're saying to the local guy is, sorry, you lose 30 million so we can keep the land in local hands. Well, if the benefits to New Zealand and not only the benefits to New Zealand but the benefits from the milk and the benefits from the exports and the benefits from the jobs that are demonstrated to be in New Zealand then we should be keeping that land in New Zealand. I actually don't, I believe that if we don't act positively to make sure that land stays in the hands of New Zealanders we will be in a situation, we'll be actually share milking on somebody else's land and that's exactly what was going to happen in the Crafer farms. Landcorp would have been the share milker on a Shanghai penge farm.