Crikey

Paul Keating was in extraordinary form on The 7.30 Report last night and it was these four quotes that got me thinking about the current Australian minerals grab by Russian, Chinese and Japanese interests.

• “Frankly if we didn’t have a pile of minerals to sell to the Chinese they’d barely doff their hat to him (Howard).”
• “One of the three people who managed China in the ’90s said to me quite candidly, ‘If the Japanese ever go to nuclear weapons, we would take them out before they started’, meaning they would attack them first.”
• “The Japanese very much resent the rising power of China, and the Chinese resent the fact that the Japanese are still trying to call the war history like some kind of self defence thing. So, the game remains nasty.”
• “Where’s the Russians, we had them. The epiphany at the end of the century, the Cold War, the wall coming down, and now we’ve lost it. Here they are putting their nuclear planes back on patrol.”

It’s bad enough that about 80% of Australia’s mineral wealth is owned by foreigners but what few people realise is that Japanese investors own more than anyone. And now the Russians and Chinese are coming with a vengeance.

Three of the latest strategic foreign investments in Australian resources companies and projects have been as follows:

• Russian steel tycoon Victor Rashnikov last night revealed his company had ploughed $500 million into Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Metals, the new force in iron ore, for a 5.4% stake.
• The Chinese government spend $200 million buying a strategic 20% stake in Queensland-based Macarthur Coal last month.
• Nexus Energy this month sold a 15% stake in its $500 million Crux gas project off the WA coast for $75 million to Japan’s Osaka Gas, the world’s seventh biggest gas utility.

Given the Keating comments, APEC and the history of Japan’s military and economic attraction towards our vast mineral interests, it is fair enough for Australians to stand back and ask exactly who owns what at this point of time.

Then, of course, you have the big question about uranium and who we should sell the stuff too. It’s no surprise that some people are more than a little nervous about John Howard’s plans to hand it over to the Russians, following his Chinese and Indian decisions.

If there ever was a blow up involving either Russia, China, Japan or the US, the question of Australian minerals going into the military hardware would be a challenging issue for any government.

Keating’s scary disclosures have now put this issue firmly on the agenda.