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

ABSTRACT

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.

澳大利亚的外国投资政策既要实现自由主义的资本流入最大化，又要确保国家主义的流入资本要符合“国家利益”。本文通过对政策制定者的访谈，分析了两个目标之间的矛盾。受访者对在幕后上市前规范外资的外国投资评审委员会有着直接的了解。由于外资评审委员会不滥权、不含糊、不张扬，两个目标之间的矛盾并非不可调和。政府认为外国投资并未危及国家利益。不过随着外国国有企业作为投资者的出现改变了这一估计。外资评审委员会肩负起评估有关投资对国家安全的影响。该机构不再像以往几十年那样待在幕后，而是置身于辩论澳大利亚该如何应对中国崛起的中心。

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• foreign investment
• Foreign Investment Review Board
• national security
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

David Hundt is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Deakin University, Melbourne. Much of his research has related to Korea, especially on topics relating to political economy, politics and foreign policy. Since 2018 he has been Editor-in-Chief of Asian Studies Review, after previously being an Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science (2011–2016).

Notes

1 This research on which this article is based received approval from the human ethics advisory group in the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University in 2018 (reference no. HAE-18-117).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deakin University [grant number Academic Study Leave (2018)].