Eat Yer Heart Out, Donald

When it comes to fencing out foreigners, we’re up there with the best.

Although unofficial, this has been Let’s Stick it to Johnny Foreigner week. Legislation to curtail foreign investment in property headed towards the finish line, and a new net to catch the elusive big game trophy known as Google tax was enacted unanimously.

Combined with the internet shopping tax, this shows we could teach US President Donald Trump a thing or two. In less than half the time he’s spent talking about building a wall and draining a swamp, we’ve built a sort of semi-permeable hedge around our assets and put new valves in our tax reservoir to stop leakage. What’s more, we’re 100% cage-free with respect to children (and supermarket eggs by 2025).

Multinationals nick an estimated $1.4 billion a year from our revenue via inter-country profit switcheroos. And as in numerous other developed countries, foreign investors, chiefly cashed-up Chinese who lack well-developed domestic investment options, have pumped up our property market. The latter is a mixed blessing, as who doesn’t want what – in this country at least – is usually their chief asset to skyrocket in value? But the perennially overheated housing market has become a political tar baby. No one but the most vengefully redistributive politician wants to drive property prices down aggressively, but the long-term consequences of home ownership being the preserve of the rich is politically untenable.

There has long been a doughty coalition of deniers who, despite years of reports and statistics in the Financial Times, Economist and the like about what China’s new rich are doing with their dosh, have insisted: it isn’t happening here.