There’s going to be a lot of soul searching, head scratching and navel gazing on the issue of foreign investment in Australia’s resource sector. It once was Japanese investment causing concern about the threat to our unique way of life but now that we all drive Toyotas it no longer seems to be such a worry.

Today it’s the Chinese — but please don’t get me wrong, it’s not about the people, it’s about money and its influence on national policy and long-lasting environmental outcomes.

The problem is in dealing with a country run by a small group of powerful men, unelected by the people, who set the future direction of the whole place via exclusive meetings behind closed doors. And that’s just here in Australia — goodness knows how the Chinese communist government works.

The question to be answered about acceptable levels of foreign investment centres around ownership. How much of Australia should be owned by overseas corporations and investors?

So what belongs to us now? Perhaps a block of land with a nice house, or a farm on a few hundred (or a few hundred thousand) acres of pasture, or maybe a business enterprise. We’ve staked our claims across the land and filled the space inside the fences with the trappings of prosperity. ‘Emoh Ruo’.

But who owns the infrastructure of our technological world: the finance sector, communications networks, transport systems, food production and distribution, the larger workplaces and all the rest of it?

Recent government policy has been to sell into private ownership the publicly owned enterprises that were profitable; banks, telephones, bulk freight, ports, lotteries and even the supply of electricity if they can get away with it!
This leaves just the unprofitable services, like healthcare and education, to be funded by taxpayers.

In New South Wales the coal under our feet is the public asset of greatest interest to our trading partners. It is the fuel for the engine room of their current economic prosperity.

It actually belongs to ‘The Crown’, but the Queen has magnanimously passed this on to the people of NSW. The right to mine and take the coal however, belongs to the leaseholder and that right is protected by legislation.

As long as these lease-holding mining conglomerates, no matter who or what owns them, abide by the rules of the day and pay us our 10% royalty, they can dig it up and cart it away.

This is where we have a problem if the government of the day issues the right to mine in a sensitive area; say under a water supply area, as is the case with the proposed coalmine under the Woronora dam catchment.

If we allow governments to carelessly give away the rights to our minerals, with insufficient regard for environmental consequences, there might come a time when our children will be forced to renege on the contracts.

Then, the people from ‘up there’ might well come down here not to steal what is ours, but to claim what is theirs.