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The changing role of the FIRB and the politics of foreign investment in Australia

journal contribution
posted on 2020-01-01, 00:00 authored by David HundtDavid Hundt
Australia's policy on foreign investment aims to achieve both the liberal goal of maximising capital inflows and the statist one of ensuring that those inflows are in 'the national interest'. This article analyses the tensions between these goals through interviews with policymakers who have direct knowledge of the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), which has functioned as an 'offstage', pre-market regulator for capital inflows to Australia. The tensions between these policy goals were manageable because the FIRB exercised its powers rarely, decisively and quietly, and the government believed that foreign investment did not threaten the national interest. The emergence of state-owned enterprises as foreign investors, however, significantly altered this calculus, and the FIRB has been tasked with assessing the national security implications of proposed investments. Instead of working offstage, as in earlier decades, the FIRB has become central to debates about how Australia should respond to the rise of China.

History

Journal

Australian journal of political science

Volume

55

Pagination

328-343

Location

Abingdon, Eng.

ISSN

1036-1146

eISSN

1363-030X

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

3

Publisher

Taylor & Francis