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.

The arguments by Oliver Hartwich in support of foreign investors continuing to take not only profits, but the finite resources that generate those profits, off shore is spectacular in its tunnel vision. He claims no one would argue that foreign companies reinvesting in Australia create jobs and economic activity. So do natural disasters. Not all economic activity is the same.

But he is not alone with this snake oil salesman's view of the world. And we can expect to continue to hear this kind of crazed, cacophonous noise - and really that is all it is - until the Resources Rent Tax and a carbon price are well and truly established.

There's no end of potential investors in Australia, including foreign governments looking at the longer term value of owning a piece of the Australian pie. What a pity that Australians who call themselves business men cannot think past the quick buck. Same for opportunist politicians in both major parties.

I think we're all tired of hearing the bleating of mining magnates and the likes of Harvey Norman and Ita Buttrose . . . these bloated people who want to pull up the drawbridge now that they're sitting pretty to protect their privilege no matter how high the cost to current and future generations of ordinary Australians. They just don't get it and no matter how hard they try to sell the economic myth, the utter superstition, that private wealth equates to the public good, the battle they're fighting is a losing one and we have news for them.

We were all in the room when the citadels of the marketeers came crashing down around all our ears. It's time for ideologues to step out of the way. We want a future that is cleaner and sustainable, one where we can recognise the difference between sensible enterprise and sheer greed.

Russell Pollard

*It’s the luck of history as to where Australia’s mineral wealth ends up*

Nor really David. For in the end, people make their own luck.
Australians are the world's biggest gamblers. So throwing it down
the pokies is clearly more fun, then investing in their own country.

If people spent that 20 billion a year spent on gambling, instead
buying BHP shares, luck would have it that more profits would
land up in Australia.

If anyone has any of those worthless paper US dollars or Pounds (well they are no good here according to him) I don’t mind if they send them to me…..
I have found a use for them.
Thank you in advance for allowing me to take them off your hands.

Maybe commenters on the issue of foreign mine ownership should do a little more research. Obvious questions would be:
1. How much are combined mining royalties, corporate taxes and input payments (wages, services) to Australians. How do they break down per mining company, how per region. How much of the exported value stays in Australia (ie is transferred to Australians)
2. Investment: how large are the accumulated investments (say over the past 20 years) of the foreign miners (count for convenience's sake Rio as foreign and BHP as local, though both companies' centre of power is in the UK). What are the components (cash, immovables, leasehold improvements?
3. How easy/costly would it be for a foreign miner to repatriate accumulated profits in response to, eg, lack of reinvestment opportunities, overall leveraging (after a private equity takeover) or hostile gvt policy
4. What could an Australian gvt do to maximize medium term (say 10 years) utility from the resources that it owns, including actions often considered "sovereign risk" like increasing royalty payments, apply existing rules much more strictly, act opportunistically where possible
5. Why does Australia give away the condensates associated with offshore gar (to be processed into LNG) which may represent more value than the gas itself?
6. Why does Australia not hire an operating company to exploit onshore natural gas reserves itself in order to keep relatively clean and abundant energy cheap, rather than paying clearly inefficient bribes to all kinds of pressure groups within a policy formally directed at reducing COP2 emissions..
7 And so on. Pse notice that "employment" would not be part of my questions: that is only relevant to actors interested in maximizing votes.

Anyone who can answer all of these questions satisfactorily has a right to speak publicly on ths issue.

I doubt anyone knows all of the answers and even more that that someone will be allowed to share her knowledge. Which may be a good thing..

Rien Huizer:
In regard to the gas that is being sold to overseas interests, Australia is going to be sorry that this is happening. As the amount of Australian oil diminishes and it is down to about 30% of out present needs now, we should be converting out truck fleets to running on gas.
OK we have a large reserve at the moment but the more we sell overseas now, the less for us later.
The gas (and oil) industry should be nationalized so as to control its use.
It is not a case of profits going overseas so much as the end use of the gas, being available for us.