You are really testing me today.
We are still having this difficult conversation on it within our government. Also, the problem that New Zealand has is that we only have three years for our Parliaments. In 2017, suddenly the conversation of Chinese political interference became something within the public eye as a result of my paper going public, and it confirmed what our SIS was saying. When our new government was formed, it took six weeks for them to form a coalition government. They had to do their own assessments. That took six months, and it was difficult, because it completely challenged our existing thinking about China, which had been seeing China as this economic partner, and there was also a kind of hopeless sense that there was a problem we couldn't do anything about.
What my country decided finally was that national security trumps economic security. In other words, without national security you have no economic security, and everybody needs to learn this lesson, from our businesses to our universities.
Then it took another year to start this inquiry into foreign interference, and there was a big battle to make it a public conversation.
It's a slow journey. At the end of the first inquiry, which lasted over one year, our Minister of Justice said we will be passing more legislation. I think you know from your own process in Canada that, exactly because the problem as Monsieur Juneau-Katsuya has talked about is so bad in our society and so endemic, it takes a long time to address. However, we are addressing it and we are slowly passing legislation on, for example, looking at overseas investment in New Zealand. Now there's a national security requirement.
I can forward a paper I've written recently that shows the legislative change. Because we are democracies, we have to have this public conversation about it. We don't just arbitrarily change our policies. It's our strength and also our weakness and vulnerability, which the CCP will play on.