China

Now that the Westpac Farms formerly owned by the Crafar Family have been sold to Chinese interests, we can safely following China’s footsteps and tell the European countries imposing carbon taxes on airline to sod off. We can now claim to be doing it in the “spirit of cooperation” with our FTA partner:

China has banned its airlines from paying charges on carbon emissions imposed by the European Union.

The charges that took effect last month are aimed at curbing emissions of climate-changing gases but airlines say they are an improper tax. Dozens of countries including the US, China and Russia oppose them. New Zealand has also raised concerns.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted the Civil Aviation Administration of China as saying the airlines are not allowed to pay the tax or add other fees without government permission. The ratings agency Fitch warned in December that the conflict could spiral into a global trade dispute. The same month a European court rejected a lawsuit brought by US airlines.

Beijing could have unusually strong leverage in a possible dispute because its state-owned airlines carry large numbers of Chinese and other Asian tourists to Europe. Any disruption would hurt Europe’s travel industry when the continent is struggling with a debt crisis and high unemployment.

Air New Zealand is majority owned by the government, easy peasy. Mega brownies points on offer from our Chinese friends.

The Sunday Star-Times has the facts on farm sales to foreigners:

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.

Even when you add the Westpac farms formerly owned by the Crafars China is still lagging behind the round eyes in land investment in New Zealand.

Where was Labour’s concern as all the land sold in the previous 5 years to non-Chinese? Where was Winston Peters as seppos, canuks, poms, ockers and the evil Juice stole or birthright at market rates?

Oh that’s right…those sales are ok because they look like us.

The thing that galls me is that everyone opposed to these sales thought nothing of the fact that they were privately owned, and were like any other private sale sold to the highest bidder. I suspect that those who cried the loudest had the least.

Labour now has a bizarre policy that sales to foreigners are ok if they live here…and after all the racist outrage over the past month you have to wonder why any rich lister Chinese investor would even bother.

The missing component in all this is the fact that if a Kiwi buyer bought the farms…oh I don’t know…someone like Michael Fay…the purchase would be highly leveraged and the “profits”, such as they are, would flow offshore anyway to the Aussie banks that financed the purchase.

As for the facetious arguments that Chinese buyers of land won’t spend money in new Zealand…well just where are they supposing they are going to vet services from, or fencing supplies, or mechanics for their farm implements, or tankers to pick up the milk, or drivers to drive the tankers?

Chris Trotter in a DomPost opinion piece has called out David Shearer and Labour for their hypocrisy and racism over the Crafar Farms deals:

It was all the more perplexing, then, to hear Opposition leader David Shearer declaring his and the Labour Party’s opposition to the sale. It’s simply inconceivable that Mr Shearer is unaware of the MFN prohibition against denying China the same right to buy land as the nations that bought upwards of 650,000 hectares of our national patrimony exercised when Helen Clark was Prime Minister, and Mr Shearer’s friend (and former boss) Phil Goff was the Minister of Trade.

To avoid the inevitable charges of rank hypocrisy and populist opportunism, Mr Shearer needed to accompany his statement opposing the sale with an announcement that Labour was committed, immediately on regaining office, to repudiating the New Zealand-China FTA and tightening up the legislation regulating overseas investment.

I’m still waiting for those other shoes to drop. And, frankly, I think I’ll go on waiting. Why? Because I simply don’t believe Labour is about to abandon its long-standing commitment to free trade. Nor am I confident Mr Shearer is any more willing to court the fury and retaliatory trade restrictions of the Chinese government than Mr Key. Both are well aware that this country’s future prosperity is inextricably bound up with China’s.

If foreign ownership of our land was something successive governments wished to restrict, they should have legislated against it before they embraced the doctrine of free trade.

 

Chris Trotter has written about the Crafar Farms decision:

AT THE RISK of being branded a “traitor”, I’m declaring my support for the Crafar Farms sale. Not because I like seeing productive New Zealand farmland pass into the hands of foreigners, I don’t. The reason I’m in favour of the sale is because I believe New Zealanders should keep their promises and fulfil their undertakings.

In 2008 this country ratified a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the Peoples’ Republic of China. That agreement was hailed as the most important foreign policy and trade achievement of the Helen Clark-led government of 1999-2008. Not only was it the first such agreement to be signed between China and a western-style democracy, but it also offered New Zealand businesses immense economic opportunities.

Those opportunities were, of course, reciprocal. The Chinese have been merchants and traders for the best part of three thousand years. They needed no reminding that in this world you don’t get something without giving something in return. And what we gave China was “Most Favoured Nation” (MFN) status.

In the context of the Crafar Farms Sale, MFN means: “If it’s okay to sell New Zealand farmland to Americans, Englishmen, Germans and Indonesians, then it must also be okay to sell farmland to the Chinese.” Under the terms of the NZ-China FTA, the Peoples’ Republic is legally entitled to no lesser consideration than that shown to the most favoured of our trading partners.

That’s what Prime Minister John Key meant when he said “our hands are tied”. It’s what New Zealand’s leading critic of the NZ-China FTA, Professor Jane Kelsey, meant when she stated:

“If the New Zealand government had declined the Shanghai Pengxin purchase of the Crafar farm it could have faced an international law suit for breaching its free trade agreement with China […] The government cannot treat applications from Chinese investors differently from similar applications from other countries’ investors under what is known as the ‘most-favoured-nation’ or MFN rule.”

And that’s not all. Had the application from Shanghai Pengxin been declined by the Overseas Investment Office that decision would almost certainly have been challenged in a New Zealand court. And rightly so. We’d have broken our own rules.

This is why I read and enjoy Chris Trotter’s writing. He is partisan but not so blinkered that he can actually see reality before him.

The Crafar Farms sale decision has thrown up some very strange politics.

There was Winston Peters supporting Michael Fay, which is utterly strange in itself. But nothing could be stranger than seeing Labour pursuing the prospect of being sued by China - over an FTA signed by Phil Goff…

Labour says its opposition to the sale of the Crafar farms to a Chinese company is not racist.

Labour leader David Shearer claimed yesterday that Prime Minister John Key and Land Information Maurice Williamson have accused the party of being racist.

“I have been called much worse,” Mr Shearer said.

What concerned him was that by implication, National was labelling every New Zealand opposed to the sale as anti-Chinese and possibly racist when what they opposed was “the sale of profitable New Zealand-owned assets to foreign interests.”

Predictably assorted crazies, including Jane Kelsey have waded into the dispute. Despite being a raving lefty who opposes all FTAs and the fact that she tries very hard to stick it to the Government the bottom line is that Phil Goff’s FTA with China pretty much guaranteed that Maurice Williamson and Jonathan Coleman were always going to approve a bid that fully complied with the law, rather than react to knee-jerk xenophobia from politicians desperate for traction.

Trevor Mallard continues to run the comms strategy, talking about almost anything instead of talking, like a good unionist he is, about the festering Ports dispute.

There isn’t a single post on Red Alert about the simmering dispute. Not from Mallard, not from Curran, not from Fenton and she is the spokesperson!

Nothing. Labour is missing in action and Mallard is blogging his bizarre conspiracy theories again and insulting the Prime Minister by suggesting he doesn’t have the nads.

It is all about the politics of distraction.

Let me get this straight. Mallards rides to Taupo along the Desest Road, on a day when Labour is attacked nationwide from Martyn Bradbury to Denis Welch to Chris Trotter and he posts about Key’s balls?

I don’t think there is any question that John Key has the nads. He called the election in January for November 26 against all conventional wisdom. He called the election after the World Cup, against all conventional wisdom. He declared early on that he would campaign on asset sales and won the election…yeah I’d say he has balls…whereas Mallard..what did he do during election year? ..Oh that’s right he called out a blogger, challenged him to a race in a sport in which he is professional and refused the back up challenge. Some tough guy he is.

It looks like the next generation of Chinese are going to be a bunch of total soft cocks. This might appeal to metrosexual lovers like Cactus but probably won’t be much use when the good old boys in the marines come in to sort them out:

Gu Jianmei, 47, has taught at the Tianjia’an No. 3 kindergarten in Huainan, Anhui province, for three decades. She said the current generation of students had been banned from making any “big movements”, like jumping, dancing or crawling, because of fears the children might hurt themselves.

“We have padded all the stairs, bannisters, corners and the children do not do physical exercise. Instead we lie them on cushioned mats,” she said.

“They are more aggressive, and also more weak. They cannot control themselves and they give up when given tasks to do. Because their parents do everything for them, they do not believe they can do things themselves. They cannot even do up their buttons,” she said.

“Actually, this means they are less prepared for when they do come into a dangerous situation.”

Yes, lying on cushioned mats is the ideal start to life.

Freshly sworn in as Foreign Minister, Murray McCully jumps straight into the job and…sticks up for a bloody unionist:

Foreign Minister Murray McCully has conveyed to Fiji’s foreign minister New Zealand’s disappointment at the regime refusing a union delegation entry to the country.

The group, including CTU president Helen Kelly, wanted to investigate allegations of human and labour rights breaches by the Bainimarama government.

It was turned away at Nadi airport.

Mr McCully says there’s direct action the Government can take.

“What we’re hoping for is that Fiji’s going to listen to the fact that the international community want to see some movement in the right direction, this is not movement in the right direction.”

He says they’re looking for signs from Fiji that there will be free and fair elections.

Sheesh Murray, you are having a ‘mare. Instead of sticking up for a hobbit hater how about making some meaningful offers to Fiji for assistance on the road to democracy. Once again NZ wags the finger and tut-tuts over Fiji.

Why aren’t we offering to send some Electoral Commission folk up there to assist? How about some experts in conducting a census? Both of things are areas Fiji needs desperate advice on before they can hold free and fair elections.

If we don’t do anything to help then China sure as hell will. Then let’s see how Helen Kelly would get on visiting and protesting China’s influence in the South Pacific.

via Boing Boing

I am reliably informed by my Hong Kong correspondent that this is usual in Hong Kong aas well.

Steve Jobs didn’t think much of government regulations either:

Mr Jobs told him that the US was too unfriendly to business, and that companies would rather build factories in China than in America, where they were frustrated by “regulations and unnecessary costs”.