Let’s talk about a real foreign ownership register

On that front the foreign owners would not need to be particularly profitable to have an edge. The old joke about the farmer winning Lotto only to “keep farming until it’s all gone” is based on a core truth. Most farmers are not very profitable and pay little or no tax. Indeed, Cubbie Station went broke while Australians owned it.

Not that foreign shareholders can expect to do a lot better. The Japanese company Kirin, for example, has done its shareholders no favours by acquiring the dairy processor National Foods. Indeed, the history of foreign agricultural investors in Australia is one of lower profitability than shrewd locals. It’s just that not all locals are shrewd.

One way or another the register should also try to record whether the foreign farm is likely to send all the food it produces back to its owner’s country and leave Australia without enough for itself. I’m not sure how that could be confirmed – perhaps by having its’ own trucks and ships along with a private army and black helicopters. I suspect others will have a better idea about that than me.

An obvious requirement of the register would be to identify the nationality of the foreign purchaser. Despite their inability to pronounce ‘fish’ correctly and annoying tendency to talk about rugby, it would not be fair to treat Kiwis the same as other foreigners. Indeed, they should probably be exempted from the register entirely.

The truth is, there are degrees of foreignness. Brits and Americans have owned plenty of land in the past without causing much concern. The Japanese raised some hackles back in the nineties when they began buying property, but in the end most of them lost money. It is really the Chinese, who we’ve had dubious feelings about ever since they came to Australia to dig for gold in the 1860s, and the Arabs, to whom we assigned the term ‘wog’ in WW1, that provoke concern.

Thus knowing the nationality of the foreign landowners will give us information about what we are really worried about. 

And finally, we should record whether the foreign investors are owned by ordinary hard-working people, as Canadian and Swedish pension funds are, or by a government that locks up political dissidents or treat women as second-class citizens. That would at least give us information about issues that matter.