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Associate Finance Minister David Seymour has announced the Government's plan to make it easier for New Zealand businesses to receive international investment in a reform of the Overseas Investment Act.
Speaking from the Ikea construction site at Auckland's Sylvia Park, Seymour said New Zealand was one of the hardest countries in the developed world for people to invest in business and that our productivity growth was "woeful".
"The package will speed up decisions and provide more confidence to investors, while protecting our national interests."
He said overseas investment could better support economic growth because workers with better tools and technologies were "more productive and get paid more".
"New Zealand’s productivity growth has closely tracked the amount of capital workers have had to work with.
"Our capital-to-labour ratio has seen very little growth in the last 10 years, averaging approximately 0.7% annually. That’s compared to growth of around 2% a year in the previous 10 to 15 years. Unsurprisingly, productivity growth averaged 1.4% a year between 1993 and 2013, but only 0.2% between 2013 and 2023."
The reform package included:
Seymour said Cabinet had agreed to remove the barriers for high-value investments such as significant business assets, existing forestry and non-farmland which account for around $14 billion of gross investment annually.
Existing protections for residential land, farmland and fishing quotas would be retained, he added.
"Nearly every other developed country has less obstructive laws than New Zealand.
"They benefit from the flow of money and the ideas that come with overseas investment. If we are going to raise wages, we can’t afford to ignore the simple fact that our competitors gain money and know-how from outside their borders."
