The Morrison government has hardened its rhetoric against China in the wake of the Chinese virus pandemic, as well as effectively abolishing the threshold for Foreign Investment Review.
If only it would start showing as much trouser as it does mouth.
Only last week, I reported on Chinese companies buying up a swath of private hospitals in Australia – a strategic purchase which, coincidentally I’m sure, gives the Chinese Communist Party that much easier access to Australia’s massive My Health Record online database.
Then there were the shocking revelations of China pillaging Australia – and the world’s – vital medical supplies at the same time that it was secretly exporting the Wuhan outbreak.
Now, another valuable piece of strategic real estate has fallen into Chinese hands.
Mawallok estate, a heritage-listed sheep station in Stockyard Hill, Victoria, has publicly sold for the first time since 1847.
The buyer, Qingnan Wen, is the founder of Tianyu Wool, one of the largest wool importers and manufacturers in China, as well as one of the biggest buyers of Australian wool.
This is not the first Australian country estate in the portfolio of the Chinese billionaire. In 2014 he purchased the 2000ha Lal Lal Estate near Ballarat and four years later the grazing properties Mokanger & Lewana near Hamilton, combining 1587ha of land.
The newest addition to the collection is described as “one of Australia’s most historic pastoral holdings”. An impressive 2349ha area includes a renowned Arts and Crafts style 2-storey homestead with 10 bedrooms, 2 tennis courts, a 6-hole golf course, a 10-hectare lake, and an astonishing 2.5-hectare English garden setting designed by William Guilfoyle.
If the government is serious about stopping the “Silent Invasion” of Australia, they’re not showing much sign of it.
Firstly, let’s not pretend that this is a “private” corporation. In China, there is frankly no such thing. Anything above the smallest businesses are, by Chinese law, required to have Chinese Communist Party political officers on board.
Secondly, China’s useful idiots in Australia like to babble that, “Oh, but Chinese investment is only X amount of all foreign investment”. This is an idiotic argument that not only ignores the first point above, but also the strategic nature of China’s buy-up of Australia. In the early days of Australia’s settlement, wealthy investors would “peacock” government land sales – that is, they would deliberately purchase strategic lots of land, such as those with water supplies, ignoring the vast but relatively worthless tracts of land surrounding them.
China’s buy-up of Australian land is similarly strategic peacocking. For instance, the Van Diemen’s Land company in Tasmania, which, as local farmers assert, has “been left to go to shit”. The point was only ever getting a strategic foothold.
The most jaw-dropping example, though, is handing over the Port of Darwin to a Chinese-owned company. That was one of the most baffling strategic decisions by an Australian government since selling war-making material to Japan in 1938.
If the Morrison government is serious about coming down hard on China for weaponising the Wuhan pandemic, it needs to grow a pair. Now. If the bureaucrats at FIRB keep allowing China to buy the family farm, then clean out the bureaucrats.
Either way, this has to stop.
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