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Labour hits out at Govt over unmonitored foreign land purchases

Author
Gia Garrick,
Publish Date
Tue, 28 Mar 2017, 5:21PM
Andrew Little is taking aim at the Government over foreign land purchases (Supplied)
Andrew Little is taking aim at the Government over foreign land purchases (Supplied)

Labour hits out at Govt over unmonitored foreign land purchases

Author
Gia Garrick,
Publish Date
Tue, 28 Mar 2017, 5:21PM

Labour is taking aim at National over unmonitored foreign land purchases.

Leader Andrew Little has documents that he says show more than 250,000 hectares of New Zealand land has been bought by foreigners, without proper approval from the Overseas Investment Office, since 2011.

However, the Minister in charge of Land Information New Zealand, Mark Mitchell, said Labour's figures are way off when it comes to foreign land sales in the past six years.

Mr Mitchell said he doesn't know where Mr Little got that figure from, saying it's grossly inflated in terms of the land involved in retrospective applications - which is actually about 14 hundred hectares of land, not 257 thousand.

Mr Little said when cases are looked into retrospectively, only minimal fines are ever imposed.

"[You] can't find any case where they impose the maximum fine - the average fine is $8500 - and when you are dealing with property transactions that sometimes run into the millions, then that sort of money is just pathetic"

He said it's down to a lack of oversight by the National Government.

"They've done nothing meaningful to give the Overseas Investment Office the power to do more, or indeed the resources to properly enforce, the law that they've got to enforce".

But Mr Mitchell disputes that, saying funding’s actually increased to the OIO, and they’ve upped the number of staff in its compliance unit.

 

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