From the foundation of the wool industry in the 1820s to the mining boom of the 2000s, Australia’s economy has been built on foreign investment. Yet we’ve always had an equivocal attitude towards it. Foreign takeovers of national brands like Arnotts and the Chiko Roll raise nationalist passions. We fear foreign mining companies are taking our resources without paying a fair return and that multinationals are avoiding our taxes. And foreign car companies have milked governments for all the subsidies they can get and then quit when they can get no more. David Uren’s new book, Takeover, traces the history of the Australian stance towards foreign investment. It has deep roots in both the right and the left of Australian politics. On the right, the rise of protectionism in the 1850s still shapes the attitudes of the National Party, while on the left, the dark suspicion of international capital, which first took root in the early union movement in the 1880s, still generates a hostility to globalization in the Greens and the Labor left. There are still faint echoes of the racist hostility towards Chinese immigration in the 1880s which gave rise to the White Australia policy. Takeover explores the nationalist forces which led to the regulation of foreign investment in the 1970s and reveals the patterns in Australia’s attitudes towards the successive waves of foreign investment from the British, the Americans, the Japanese and the Chinese. It tells the story of the birth and death of the motor industry and it examines the passions which are still fired by foreign investment in housing and farm land. It examines the threat to tax revenue posed by the rise of the stateless corporation and the debates over sovereignty generated by the new generation of global free trade agreements. How does foreign investment affect the national interest?

Takeover: Foreign Investment and the Australian Psyche PDF

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