Interview: Chinese investment in Australia welcome: FIRB chief

Brian Wilson, Australia's top officer overseeing foreign investment, recently said the country is open to foreign investment and Chinese investors are welcome.

In an exclusive interview on the "Talk to China" show in Xinhua 's Sydney office, Wilson said the aim of Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) is to encourage and develop relationships for foreign investment in Australia, but within a rule-governed framework. "Australia is a large economy with a small population, and the government has the phrase'open for business'which is really saying 'we welcome foreign investment'," FIRB chairman Wilson said. "Foreign investment is important for Australia, and without it we would be a smaller economy, have lower employment, lower incomes. So it's something that's attractive,"he added.

Australian history has shown that success in trade tends to lead in the future to success in investment. "That has been shown over 100 years with the U.K., the U.S. and Japan,"Wilson said. All the countries he mentioned were Australia' s biggest trade partners for a while.

China is now Australia's largest bilateral trading partner with China comprising 22 percent of the country's annual trade which is set to grow with the recently validated Free Trade Agreement (FTA). But investment from China makes up only 4 percent of Australian total foreign investment. "We would expect over the next few years Chinese investment in Australia will continue to grow,"Wilson said."And we would also expect, of course, particularly with the Free Trade Agreement, that Australian investment in China will also continue to grow."

The benefits of the FTA will be immediate. Currently, the threshold for Chinese private company investment in Australia is up to 250 million Australian dollars (182 million U.S. dollars) before a detailed FIRB screening examination is undertaken. But for countries with an FTA with Australia, that threshold rises to almost 2 billion Australian dollars (1.46 billion U.S. dollars). "We are seeing investment from China grow dramatically as you would expect, because trade tends to give rise to future investment. And for the first time in 2013-2014, the Chinese investment inflow into Australia was the largest from any country, "Wilson said.

Australia's FIRB was established in 1976 to advise the government on foreign investment issues.

The surge in Chinese investment to Australia within the past decade,particularly in residential property and large-scale agriculture, has attracted a lot of local media scrutiny and a degree of community edginess. "One thing I'd like to point out is back over 100 years, in the early part of the 20th century, there was a lot of concern in Australia about the British buying up everything. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of public concern about Americans making foreign investment in Australia. And the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeover Act came in in 1975. In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a lot of concern about Japanese investing in Australia. And now of course over the past six or seven years, there has been concern about China investing in Australia,"Wilson said. "People, not just in Australia, but all over the world don't really like change. But after a while something becomes familiar, I have no doubt in another few years no one will be concerned about Chinese investment in Australia,"Wilson said. "We might be concerned about some other country that is starting to move up the investment curve."

FIRB, overall, has approved 136 billion Australian dollars from Chinese interests across the board with more than 700 of those being business cases. "We like people to advise us early of their plans to seek guidance,"Wilson said, adding that "We do have on the FIRB website a summary of the foreign investment regime in Mandarin, which is helpful to potential Chinese investors." "What China has and needs and what Australia wants and needs are very complimentary,"he said."Australian authorities and businesses know how valuable the Australia-China partnership is." Endi