The couple of points that the economic illiterate deliberately omits to mention:

1 The big mining companies that are largely foreign owned, also have in most cases most of their mining profit generated overseas, much of which accrues to the Australian share holders:

2 So far for every $1 repatriated as profit $4 is brought in as investment.

These points are also in the report that he selectively quotes from.

short term benifit[employment]
for long term loss

yes today..they invest
next year they reap in their harvest
and when the gound is empty...we have the debts
and the holes in the ground..and they have stolen our silver

we 'invest our super'
in short term projects..[10/20 years]
our shares had stored value...till the value got stolen
[and we only got left holding on paper debt..plus remediation]

plus a big new tax to pay for it
again...this time with no mining..'investment'
[isnt that a royal perogative..loot and plunder..thats a crown affair too]..something dicktraiters do..

invest in their army today..
use their army tommorrow to kill its 'own'
who really owns what?

those investing..lend from accounts
we are forced to pay into

[pension scemes]
bank accounts..etc...
investing today..reaping tomorrow..and gone next year

double the royalties
or seize the resources
tax the infastructure when they try to move it
do they get all the tax advantages..depreciations..fuel subsidies

THAT IS FRAUD...
pay the real cost

who invests..expecting to loose their 'investment'
no one..

now they are nice...good
tomorrow they burn down your house
and go loot some other 3 rd world colony

Oliver Hartwich wants to argue that foreign ownership doesn’t matter because foreign business cannot spend Australian dollars abroad so they have to come back to Australia and buy goods and services. In the hands of foreign owners ‘our dollars are just printed paper’. No –they are likely to be electronic credit items somewhere.

Hartwich’s argument is quite quaint in other ways. Why would a foreign owned mining company bill its customers in Australian dollars? More likely they are billed in US dollars paid into some bank in London or New York. The money need never appear in any Australian account, apart from the small amount that goes to the local wage bill, royalty payments and other local expenses. Much of the money never touches Australia.

The serious argument is that Australia’s mineral wealth is estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to be worth $560 billion using out of date historic prices. That is the value of the minerals after the likely cost of extracting them and including a competitive rate of return for the investors and is likely to be worth a lot more based on current prices. The question is who gets that value. There has been no market mechanism to allocate those resources, many of our miners are monopolists who sit on a valuable resource and are able to extract much more than a competitive return. It’s the luck of history as to where Australia’s mineral wealth ends up

I assume that the author of this article is pulling our legs.
If he is not, he is abysmally naive.

Oh dear that next step would be Oliver telling us that China buying a mine sending over its own workers to work the mine and then send all of the ore back to China is great for us all. Hell we could just sell Australia and divide it up and move somewhere eh, as long as the share holders got their cut first.
This sell your grandmother logic is what saw our manufacturing sector die, is seeing our service sector die and will so see our mining sector off shored as well. Still as long as the share holders get their cut.

What do they call that again golden shower economics.

This is a topic that deserves a sensible airing, rather than simply generating knee-jerk reactions.

First, can we get some more facts... which report is this, Shadow Minister?

>>These points are also in the report that he selectively quotes from<<

When such large numbers are bandied about - Brown says “$50 billion will flow overseas to line the pockets of already very rich people.”, while the Minerals Council says “We know from an audit of some of the biggest miners that 98 per cent of cash revenue is reinvested back into Australia,” - it would be good to look at those numbers in detail, rather than simply sling insults around.

How does the outbound $50 billion stack up against the inbound investment amounts, for example. It would tell us the amount we get to keep, to "feed the family".

And what exactly is meant by "cash revenue reinvested". How does it differ from non-cash revenue, and how much would that be.

So much spin. So few facts.