<< It’s time that we calmed down and faced the fact that we cannot believe that it is fair play for us to sell our minerals to China, then take their money and run, while telling them to stay out of Australia — hypocrisy at its very worst. >>

What total hogwash, Everald!

Australia, as with any sovereign country, should be striving to keep the highest level of control over its own land and resources that it possibly can.

That means a big fat NO to selling off the farm, so to speak!

China gets our resources and gives us a fair price. It’s a win-win situation. There is no need for China to worm its way into Australia by buying up land, mines, businesses or getting their own businesses established here.

Not just China, but any foreign investment. Australia should keep control over its own assets.

Don't worry about it Luddy. We'll sell them the farm now, then come the revolution, we will just resume the lot & keep the money.

We might as well get the money, with our cleaver government's defense cuts, they could walk in here ant time they like, & take the lot if they felt like it.

Yes, selling the farm is a sin!

That doesn't mean that it should be illegal - Government has no mandate to keep us to the straight and narrow. Each one of us is a sinner to a lesser or greater extent, including those in government, so what right have they to preach?

Yet, the sell off of agricultural land is harming the Australian people in the long term. There will come a day of a global economic collapse, when Australia will be cut of from the rest of the world, and then if we cannot produce our own food we will go hungry. Of what use would Australian foreign investments be then? Even before that time, once global food production falls below consumption, don't expect the hungry Chinese to sell their produce in Australia - they will ship it straight from their farms to China, under Chinese military guard if we object, while we will remain hungry.

While the practice of selling farms to foreigners should not be outlawed, it is proper to name-and-shame those who do.

You might consider the case of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. The potato had been brought back to Europe from the Andes by the Spanish conquistadors. There were some problems in developing varieties for northern Europe due to day length issues, but these were eventually solved. The Irish found that under their conditions, they could feed three times as many people to the hectare with potatoes as with grain. They boosted their population from about 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million in the 1840s, the sort of proportional increase that some of our growthist population boosters want to impose on us. They did this even though the British, who ruled Ireland at the time, had taken over large areas of the best land to grow export crops to feed the growing number of industrial workers in England.

In the 1840s, the late blight arrived from Mexico and completely wiped out potato crops, season after season. Large numbers of people were living on plots of land that were too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes. The British continued to export food from the land that they controlled under military guard. 1-1.5 million people starved and another 1.5-2 million were forced to emigrate. As Tom Kenneally points out in his book "Three Famines", many of the emigrants were so weakened by hunger that they died on the ships or soon after arrival in the New World. Several hundred thousand people also starved in the rest of Europe, and this was a factor in the revolutions of 1848, although these other countries were not as totally dependent on potatoes.

Or on the other hand, Divergence, you might not.

>>You might consider the case of the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.<<

There is not one single touch-point between the Great Famine and the sale of farmland to overseas buyers. Not one. Particularly, when you consider that none of the land in Ireland was in fact owned by a foreign agency.

Consider first that level to which the Irish were dependent upon the potato alone for nutrition. We have no parallel dependency here in Australia.

It is also worth pointing out that Ireland had been experiencing potato "famines" for over a hundred years.

Still on the potato theme, the fact that all Irish potatoes at the time were the same "lumper" variety - i.e., they had no genetic variation, and - as a monoculture - were massively susceptible to a single disease. There is no parallel to this level of crop dependency here in Australia.

Consider next that the population was already starving. Cecil Woodham Smith, in his 1991 book "The Great Hunger", observed that "Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low."

There is no parallel situation here in Australia.

It is not wise, by the way, to rely on Thomas Keneally for historical guidance on this topic. He writes fiction.

You make no mention of the appalling management of the crisis by the parliament - presumably you anticipate that our own government would also stand aside and watch its crops exported, while we starve?

So where exactly are the lessons to learn here?

Pericles,

I haven't made any controversial claims. See the Wikipedia articles for a start on the Great Famine and the Plantations of Ireland (which shows the extent of land confiscation by the British).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland

"Three Famines" is a nonfiction book, not a novel. Why does being a novelist disqualify you from writing a serious book?

It is true that the Irish population was on the edge before the potato blight, and there were previous crop failures. What made this one different was that the blight kept coming back again and again. It wasn't a one-off response to freak weather conditions. Lack of genetic diversity was certainly an important part of the problem. The Andean farmers who domesticated the potato had more than 800 varieties.

Of course there is no direct comparison with Australia, but there are early signs of the same sorts of trends. Population boosting and a general focus on the short term in the face of uncertainty about climate change and availability of the resources needed to maintain agricultural production. Growing inequality, with the people at the top tending to feel no special loyalty towards their fellow citizens and showing little understanding of or sympathy for the situation of the people at the bottom. Note recent statements by politicians and other rich and powerful people about the minimum wage and unemployment benefits. Productive farmland and water rights being sold off to foreigners, something the Chinese themselves would not allow at home (and neither would a long list of other countries). Do you seriously believe that our Parliament wouldn't be capable of equally appalling management, especially if championing their own people involved standing up to powerful foreign interests?