Depends. Different people have different concerns about foreign ownership. But the general public probably has a very shallow understanding of it. Foreign ownership of housing is peanut scale compared to all the things that are already foreign-owned. But obviously if we talk about the large scale stuff, it tends to go over people's heads. And the fact it hides behind a 'corporate entity' protects it from public scrutiny from the average joe a bit too.
Mining is obviously an industry with a very developed foreign ownership market, far more developed than say housing or farmlands. However it is similar to agriculture in many ways in that it's a strategic resource, but at the same time probably a much more advanced sector in terms of foreign investment.
North America
The largest gold mine in Australia, for example is Boddington, and this is owned by North American firms with no Australian interest. Does this concern you? Do you think it would be better if it was in Australian hands?
AWB, which I'm sure everyone knows by now due to the Iraq scandal, is one of the largest agriculture houses and that's owned by a Canadian firm. AWB indirectly controls a lot of farmers since much feedstock go through marketing channels like this. Is that a concern to anyone?
New Economies
Or is the concern more about say China/South Korea/Russia/India, that aren't the closest in terms of culture and traditional alliances (even though they were allies in WW2)? Would you feel more comfortable with Japanese ownership (even though they were a WW2 axis power)? These nations obviously have their fair share of mines and power corporations.
TruEnergy for example is owned by Hong Kong... would people in Victoria be more worried about the fact that your electricity is controlled by a foreigner - especially a Chinese - than the fact your farms and water are? What about ownership of Optus... that's Singapore (which is basically Chinese), which based on my understanding of geopolitics would probably be on the Asian side if anything happened. They could easily tap your lines.
Basically...
Foreign ownership is already well-established in Australia. Nothing new. Housing foreign ownership is a peanut sector and I'm amazed at how sensationalised the issue is. It's probably due to the fact that the average joe understands houses, but Boddington? Who cares...
As for ownership of say mines, agriculture assets, telecommunication companies, utility companies etc, the main issue is commitment to develop. For example, a lot of foreign buyers buy up the mines here and spend billions of dollars bringing it to production. Is that necesarilly a bad thing when no one domestically is willing to commit this sort of money? If the original local owners were prepared to commit the money or if there were other local businesses prepared to commit the money, it wouldn't have ended up in foreign hands in the first place.
Whitehaven (a $3.5bn company) is now selling itself on the market. Seems like no one locally is interested as usual and all the interest is from offshore. So if you ban foreign investment it'd probably mean those mines never get developed and people living in the Hunter Valley can look forward to less jobs, and those house price rises we want can probably stay put. In short can't have it both ways.
If people want prosperity, then they need to embrace globalisation and that includes flow of funds from foreign entities in exchange for ownership of assets. Of course, you impose restrictions etc etc. Every sovereign does that. But people labelling it as 'bad' for the country probably take a too simplistic view.
As a few posters pointed out, I want to have my cake and eat it too!! Lucky the people in charge have sufficient economic sense (regardless of which side of politics) to realise what's at stake. The day we get an extremist up there, I'm bailing out.
