Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Treasurer, Senator Wong. I refer the minister to a recent study of foreign investment in prime agricultural land jointly conducted by the Politecnico di Milano in Italy and the University of Virginia in the US. That study found that almost 10 per cent of Australia's prime agricultural land is now foreign owned, putting the rate of foreign ownership in Australia at the fifth highest in the world, behind only the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sudan and South Sudan. Given these findings, will the government now admit its mistake of increasing the threshold for the Foreign Investment Review Board referral in 2009 from $100 million to more than $200 million? Isn't it time that the threshold was reduced so that at least some private foreign investment in Australian farms is reviewed by the government before it is approved?