KEY POINTS:
The Government's decision to block the Canada Pension Plan from buying a stake in Auckland Airport has not chilled international interest in New Zealand, Finance Minister Michael Cullen says.
Speaking at a breakfast hosted by law firm Simpson Grierson in Auckland yesterday, Cullen told the audience the Government remained open to foreign investors.
He cited Russian company Nutritek Overseas which was last week given consent to increase its shareholding in New Zealand Dairies from 5.65 per cent up to 100 per cent.
Cullen said the Government was also close to making a decision on the Vector Wellington lines business, which has been provisionally bought by Hong Kong infrastructure investment company Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings.
Cullen said New Zealand's free trade agreement with China was a great opportunity and the Government was also seeing support for similar agreements with India, Japan and Korea.
He was also hopeful discussions between New Zealand and its P4 trade partners - Singapore, Chile and Brunei - would be extended to include the US, a move which he said would be more likely after the US presidential elections were completed in November.
But, he said, the Government could only do so much to encourage growth in New Zealand and he called for New Zealanders to be less pessimistic about their own country.
"Why are people so pessimistic? We are a first-world country - we have a first-world standard of living, social services that deliver. We have a reasonable level of natural resources and we have a highly skilled population. But yet we have something in our psyches that says something terrible is going to happen to us."
Cullen said New Zealand should judge itself on a similar way to how it looked at its medal haul at the Olympics.
"We are never going to beat the US or China, but weeks later when we re-do the numbers we find we are [up at] number five or six on a medals-per-capita basis."
