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不知这个放在这个版块是否合适。 一会儿 墨尔本的7台 Today tonight将有一个节目 讨论 华人投资澳洲的事情 大家看后发发感想吧。 http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/video/watch/28040396/ http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-t ... buying-up-australia While some argue that this is the sort of investment that's good for the country, others worry that our best produce is being shipped away, with few benefits for Australians. Farms are falling under the hammer on a weekly basis, but not to Aussie farmers. It’s foreign countries, and their companies, that are buying up. We might have been built ‘off the sheep's back’, but now some believe that wool is being pulled over our eyes. Farmer Richard Bennett and his family own a large sheep and cattle grazing property in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains. Close by to them, a larger property - Biggam - has recently sold to an offshoot of the giant Nanshan Group – a massive Chinese company that makes the top 200 enterprises in China. More stories from Today Tonight Farmers forced out Australia's properties for sale Aussie land up for sale Now Bennett says he is nervous. “You’d be naive and unworldly if you weren’t worried about it. They don’t know who owns what, and how much,” he said. “I’ll be conferring to the rules about labour relations, and can see maybe these big companies will get their workforce in with 457 visas, and they will be outcompeting me.” Today Tonight's latest property stories The Nanshan Group owns one of the biggest Wool mills in China, processing 6 million kilos every yea, but the Biggam property is also known for its beef. So are the sheep and the cattle at Biggam going to be sold within Australia, or sent to China? Farmer Robert Belcher is managing director of Sustainable Agricultural Communities of Australia. More stories from reporter Laura Sparkes He says “if that produce was to go straight from Biggam to China, well there’s no necessity for Australians to have much employment at all. Basically it just becomes part of China, even though it’s in Australia, it’s just part of China.” Biggam is just a small part of Nanshan's grand plan. The Chinese company has its eye on 30,000 hectares of prime grazing land across New South Wales and Tasmania. “They’ve already bought a property right next to Biggam - 4000 hectares of land directly behind me, about 200 kilometres away, and now they’ve probably bought more, but we'll never know,” Bennett said. Up until this month, the Government wouldn't investigate a foreign takeover unless it was above $231 million. Despite all the concern, incredibly that trigger has just gone up to $244 million. “You could count the number of properties in Australia worth that on one hand. Most farms probably amount to a million to five million (dollars),” Belcher said. By 2050 were looking at 9 billion on the planet. We can’t feed one billion now. You don’t need to be a Rhodes scholar to understand why China is investing in agricultural land around the world.” But its by no means just China. Recent farm and agriculture businesses have been grabbed by foreign companies including Singapore, the UK, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, the US, Bahrain, Canada, Qatar, Brazil and Japan. All up, it’s $12 billion in just one year. Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan is chairing the Senate Committee hearing into foreign investment. “We’re one of the slackest on the planet. I mean you can’t go into China and buy freehold, which is why a lot of companies haven’t gone there. The United States is introducing a regulation, the Argentines, Brazil and Japan,” Heffernan said. “We ought to give serious thought to being able to control our means of production, and sell our production, rather than just as they were in medieval times - our farmers will be serfs, we won’t own our own farm.” The Federal Trades Minister, Craig Emerson, is keen to invite foreign investors in, as long as it’s in the national interest. “We’re not interested in any proposition for farms to be purchased in Australia, and that food being dedicated to a particular country’s market, at below market prices. What we are interested in is more food production for international markets,” Emerson said. This report, commissioned by the Government, found foreign or partly foreign owned Aussie farmland has shot up from 5.9 per cent to 11.3 per cent. The Opposition is calling for a definitive list on which foreign companies own what land, but the Minister disagrees. “It would be a monumental task to actually log any foreign investment transaction on the stock exchange, or with a non-listed company,” he said. But Bennett has this one warning: “The viewer sitting at home now will have to wonder how food prices will go if in the future if too much Australiam product is going overseas. Does Australia fight for the crumbs?” This reporter is on Twitter at @LauraSparkes7 [ 本帖最后由 letbe 于 2012-2-1 23:29 编辑 ] |
