{"id":888,"date":"2010-10-14T15:21:54","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T05:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=888"},"modified":"2010-10-19T10:02:16","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T00:02:16","slug":"australian-food-security-foreign-investment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/australian-food-security-foreign-investment\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian Food Security & foreign investment"},"content":{"rendered":"

After air and water, food is the most vital necessity for human beings.\u00a0 So only complete fools would ignore any threat to the future provision of quantity and quality food.<\/p>\n

Yet here we are, more than 20 million of us, virtually ignoring what is happening under our very noses.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Presumably because the average Australian has always been provided with an endless supply of top quality food at bottom drawer prices so our good fortune is completely taken for granted.\u00a0 And because it’s happening steadily, bit by bit, and NO ONE HAS JOINED THE DOTS AND MADE A COMPLETE LIST OF FOREIGN OWNERS INVOLVED IN\u00a0FOOD PRODUCTION IN AUSTRALIA, from top to bottom.<\/p>\n

The truly astonishing thing is that so many of these sales to overseas owners are made to people or companies situated in countries where Australians are strictly prohibited from buying land.\u00a0 Yet still we allow this one-way sell off without so much as lifting a finger to impose any regulations, to speak of.<\/p>\n

An article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>\u00a0by journalist Paul Myers does a good job of drawing attention to the ownership of foreign owners of Australian land and in particular, food processing companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what we need is someone in government\u00a0to invest the considerable time it would take to \u00a0make a comprehensive list of every foreign resident and every overseas-owned company who owns Australian\u00a0land – rural and residential – and who owns part or whole of an Australian \u00a0food processing or trading company.\u00a0 With a view to having a public discussion, with all the facts on the table.<\/p>\n

I thought there’d be a furore amongst taxpayers when Twynham Pastoral Company owner, Argentinean\u00a0John Kahlbetzer, was handed more than $300m for water rights, when he was already listed as owning more than $300m in Australian property.\u00a0 But no, there wasn’t a single squeak from anyone as far as I could tell.\u00a0 Now he’s selling off many of these historic properties there could have been another outcry over the stripping of water rights, but no; still silence.<\/p>\n

This was so obviously contentious, that I guess we’ll all have to be eating heavy metals, paying doubled food prices\u00a0or suffering severe food shortages before those in charge of making\u00a0Australian foreign ownership policy get off their backsides and have a good look at the issue and implement some regulation.\u00a0 By which time, it’ll be way too late.<\/p>\n

My hair curls at the thought of overseas residents buying Australian water rights, then selling them back to us at outrageously inflated prices during the inevitable times of drought.\u00a0 Who’d be stupid enough to allow anyone from another country\u00a0own Australian water rights, when we’re living on the continent with the most unreliable rainfall on the planet?\u00a0 We would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After air and water, food is the most vital necessity for human beings.\u00a0 So only complete fools would ignore any threat to the future provision of quantity and quality food. Yet here we are, more than 20 million of us, virtually ignoring what is happening under our very noses.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Presumably because the average Australian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[158,161,166,178],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":949,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions\/949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}