Fears that China is gobbling up New Zealand land are misplaced, official figures show.
Americans, Canadians and even Liechtensteinians are buying far more land.
Figures released by the Overseas Investment Office show that of the 872,313 hectares of gross land sold to foreign interests over the past five years, only 223ha were sold to Chinese.
People from the landlocked principality of Liechtenstein had purchased 10 times more land than the Chinese - 2,144ha in the same period.
The top buyers were the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Israel. The United States had 194 purchases for a total of 193,208ha.
Now bear in mind that the figures above do NOT include the proposed sale of the Crafar farms, or as they should be more correctly entitled, the Westpac farms, formerly owned by the Crafars. So it would seem that concerns over New Zealand being overrun by Chinese dairymaids are a little premature.
That won't stop the xenophobia, of course. We listened to talkback radio as we drove home last night, where caller after caller was critical of the sale of the Westpac farms. The fact that they are/were privately owned seemed to have escaped callers, who were confusing them for state assets. But at least a couple of callers used words such as "but Winston said...", which rather undermines their argument!
And as for land sales to Israel; where's John Minto when you need him?
3 comments:
Gross land may not be the best measure as that includes land already owned by foreign owners, net is the measure of 'new' land transfereed to foreign interests
In a sense, Crayfars were foreign owners. Good management and sound husbandry were foreign to them.
Xenophopia.
I think I played that at primary school instead of the recorder.
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