Stuff reports:

The four largest private landowners in New Zealand are all foreign-owned forestry companies, an RNZ investigation has found.

Despite a clampdown on some overseas investment, including a ban on residential sales to offshore buyers, the Labour-led government has actively encouraged further foreign purchases of land for forestry through a streamlined “special forestry test”.

Since the government was formed, the Overseas Investment Office (OIO) has approved more than $2.3 billion of forestry-related land sales – about 31,000 hectares of it previously in New Zealand hands.

And not just forestry land

Overall, nearly $5b of sensitive land has changed hands through the OIO since the government was formed.

Now personally I have no problem with foreign ownership of land. They can’t take it away and allowing foreigner buyers mean sellers (who are mainly NZers) get the best price for their land.

But Labour, NZ First and Greens have all campaigned vigorously against foreign land ownership. Labour basically promised to abolish it and instead they’ve approved $5 billion of sales.

The first two years of National Government saw just 31,000 hectares of land sold – a rate Labour claimed was awful despite it being 1/4 of the last Labour Government.

Now if $2.3 billion of forestry land sold is 31,000 hectares and total land sold has been $5.0 billion that suggests Labour has approved sales of around 70,000 hectares in two years.

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