Shearer calls for Chinese Crafar bid to be rejected

Labour Party leader David Shearer. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Labour leader David Shearer is seeking to make the Government uncomfortable as a decision on a bid by a Chinese company to buy the Crafar farms looms by visiting one of the farms in question, where he called on the Government to reject the bid.

Mr Shearer yesterday visited one of the Crafar farms alongside local iwi who also want to buy it and are behind a rival bid. Mr Shearer visited the farm while in Taupo for the Labour Party caucus retreat. The 16 Crafar farms were put into receivership in October 2009.

A government decision on the bid by the Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin is due within days.

The company proposal to buy the farms for $200 million and lease them back to Landcorp has been before the Overseas Investment Office for the past nine months.

Prime Minister John Key yesterday said the Overseas Investment Office had made its recommendation to the Government and the ministers responsible would decide on that prior to the January 31 deadline the receivers had given for the sale to become unconditional. However, he would not reveal what that recommendation was or give his own view on the bid.

Those ministers are Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson and Associate Finance Minister Jonathan Coleman.

Mr Shearer said the deal should not be accepted.

"The Government has the last say on this issue and they can determine whether this land sale goes ahead or not. If there is going to be foreign ownership then we have to make sure New Zealanders have a real interest in it and get real value from it. Now I don't think that this sale here gives us any return."

Asked why he opposed the bid so strongly when other significant tracts of land were owned by other nationalities, he said it was time to draw a line in the sand.

"We've done that in the past. I think we need to draw a line in the sand and say any future sale of land has to have a demonstrable benefit to New Zealand and New Zealanders."

He denied his attitude was xenophobic or because it was a Chinese bidder.

"It's not about who owns it - it's about selling off New Zealand to foreign ownership when we don't get real value out of it. It's about the value and investment that New Zealand gets out of it."

Mr Shearer was taken to visit the Crafar farm near Taupo by Nigel Baker of the Pahautea Lands Trust - an iwi group which is part of a consortium which includes Sir Michael Fay which is challenging the Shanghai Pengxin bid and hopes to mount its own.

Mr Baker said the farm bordered iwi-owned farmland and it had long wanted the chance to buy the farmland back since losing it in the 1880s.

The sale after the Crafar receivership was the only chance it had.

It had joined the consortium, which had taken a legal challenge against the Shanghai Pengxin bid, because it wanted to do everything possible to try to get the land back.