Just for the record, I don’t differentiate between the Chinese, the POMs, the Yanks or the Martians! If it is Australia it should be Australian owned, National sovereignty is not a guarantee of food security but if our land is owned by others, how can we guarantee the food will be on our tables if they have a shortage at home? Quite simply, we can’t!
And that is not the whole story. Even if we own our land and a rich country runs short of food and has more money to purchase our food than we do, how do we keep food on our tables?
While I am all for keeping government incompetence as much out of our daily lives as possible, accomplishing food security in times as I have outlined is not easy without government intervention.
Part of the answer to the above is to have as much land arable as possible (while also maintaining an adequate size of our bush land for non-human use) and be able to ramp up food production as quickly as possible to meet our own and others’ needs. This requires intelligent forthought and planning, charateristics either sadly lacking in our politicians or grossly subordinated to vested interests.