Foreign 'Investment' Leaving NZ
Statistics New Zealand has quietly announced that $8.9 billion of net foreign investment was withdrawn from NZ in the last financial year.
According to John Morris, of SNZ: “This is the first time that there has been a net withdrawal of foreign investment out of New Zealand since the current (balance of payments) series began in the year ended March 2001”.
Where were the Cabinet Ministers and media pundits shouting about that? Where was Bill English, who recently told the nation that the Government needs to further liberalise the 2005 Overseas Investment Act because “we need their (foreign investors’) money and jobs”?
So instead of putting money into New Zealand, these much hyped foreign investors are actually taking money out. Nearly $9 billion in fact, and just in one year.
Fancy that. The Fairy Godmother who is going to give all of us money, according to the fairy tales, is actually taking money off us.
The Government needs to find a new fairy tale book to distract us while it goes about its business of throwing the country ever more open to being sucked dry by the transnational corporations, who are the only ones to benefit from liberalising NZ’s foreign investment rules – plus the peddlers of fairy tales, of course.
Murray Horton
Secretary/Organiser
(03) 3663988/0274 307742
CAFCA
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa
Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand
cafca@chch.planet.org.nz