The chilling sign Australia has given up cracking down on foreign investment from China

A federal government body focusing on Chinese threats to national security is quietly disappearing from the internet, sparking fears that Australia could kowtow to Beijing.

The name of the Foreign Investment Review Board no longer appears on the Treasury website, except to redirect web traffic.

“The Treasury’s Foreign Investment website has replaced firb.gov.au,” it said.

Instead, there is a link to a new “Foreign Investment” website that went live this month without the FIRB name.

Australia welcomes foreign investment.

Clive Hamilton, the author of Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia, said the minor change to a Treasury website was a sign Australia was trying to be nice with China.

“I think so,” he told Daily Mail Australia.

“Certain ministers have indicated that the new government is different from the old one, which ruined the relationship and we will become more accommodating and mature in our approach to China.”

But Professor Hamilton, a Canberra-based lecturer in public ethics at Charles Sturt University, said the Chinese Communist Party was likely to exploit any weakness in Australia.

“The Labor government has tried to put on a friendlier face towards China and Chinese companies,” he said.

“Beijing is extremely cynical, so we can be sure that if Labor sends the optic that we are friendly and open to Chinese investors, Beijing will test that.”

FIRB’s former chairman David Irvine, who died in March 2022, was previously the director-general of both the Australian Security Intelligence Organization and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

Prior to that, he was Australia’s ambassador to China and took over FIRB after it authorized the Northern Territory’s former Country Liberal Party government to sign a 99-year lease for Darwin Harbor with China in 2015. company Landbridge Group.

His appointment as head of the FIRB in 2017, after a career as a diplomat and leader of Australia’s spy agencies, demonstrated the willingness of the previous coalition government to be alert to security threats from Chinese investments.

Former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg appointed former Australia’s ambassador to Japan Bruce Miller as FIRB’s new chairman with a five-year term in April 2022, a month before the federal election.

But under Mr Frydenberg’s leadership, Treasury announced in 2020 that a new foreign investment website would be created for foreign residents looking to invest outside of Australia’s properties.

It would also include a new guide on how to navigate foreign investment rules.

Professor Hamilton said the FIRB, under the previous administration, had been given more resources to investigate security threats from possible Chinese investments in critical infrastructure after Huawei was banned from installing 5G mobile networks in Australia.

“However, the FIRB allowed some very questionable foreign investment into key Australian infrastructure and, in my view, sometimes failed to do its job properly to protect Australia’s national security,” he said.

The Foreign Investment Review Board, which still operates today, was established in April 1976 as a non-statutory body to advise the government on foreign investment proposals, acquisitions and new investment projects.

The name of the Foreign Investment Review Board no longer appears on the Treasury website, except to redirect web traffic (pictured is Treasurer Jim Chalmers with his wife Laura)

FIRB’s former chairman David Irvine, who died in March 2022, was previously the director-general of both the Australian Security Intelligence Organization and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (he is pictured in 2014)

A ‘Foreign Investment’ website has replaced the Foreign Investment Review Board

It was not enacted as a parliamentary law under former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, meaning it could more easily be abolished or downgraded.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Treasurer Jim Chalmers and his department for comment.

China is Australia’s largest buyer of residential real estate, with $2.3 billion spent in the nine months to March 2023 buying 1,775 properties, Treasury data showed without reference to FIRB.

That equates to $8.4 million a day from Chinese investors.

Since taking power in May 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government has taken a more conciliatory approach to Chinese diplomacy, seeking to reverse trade sanctions imposed on a range of Australian exports during the Covid pandemic .

China is Australia’s largest two-way trading partner, with exports worth $184.7 billion by 2022.

But they fell by two percent due to a series of trade sanctions as export volumes increased during the year in Japan, South Korea, India and the United States.