Media Release

Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter has attacked the sell-off of Australia to foreign corporations, the latest example being the sale of Van Diemen’s Land Company to the Chinese.

Yesterday the Federal Treasurer announced the sale of Tasmania’s 17,800ha Van Diemen’s Land Company to Chinese billionaire Lu Xianfeng’s Moon Lake Investments for $280 million could go ahead.

But Mr Katter said Australia needed to wake up to the fact that foreign investment is just the sell-off of our country and the value of its production.

“No one in North Queensland is anti-China or anti-Chinese – probably a quarter of the population have Chinese gold rushers somewhere in the family tree.

“But China is a country with enough money to buy out the whole of Australia. And once your country is owned by somebody else, you get no benefit.

“What we’re looking at is vertical integration – it starts at the farm and goes right through to the end consumer.

“The farm equipment will come from China, what few workers there are will be mostly from China, the profits will be price transferred off shore meaning negligible tax paid in Australia.

“Australians will play no part and I do not know at what point Australia benefits,” Mr Katter said.

Mr Katter said that already the proportion of foreign owned land in Australia was cause for serious concern.

“The Federal Government Inquiry in 2006 showed that 11% of Australia was foreign owned.

“And that sounds like no problem – but 52% of Australia’s surface area is on the World Register of Deserts, over 20% is in some sort of National Park like arrangement for our First Australians, and 7% is National Parks.

“So of the remaining 21% of Australia’s surface area – 11% was foreign owned.

“I often used to wonder why we had the highest wool income in the world and why Uruguay, whose main production was wool, was one of the poorest countries on earth.

“I found out later that over 72% of the land mass in Uruguay was owned by foreigners – and therein lay the answer.

“So can any person in the ALP and LNP honestly call themselves Australian – when the biggest production farm in Australia is now being flogged off to a foreign corporation,” Mr Katter said.