CUBBIE STATION.
It has bi-partisan support.
The only people against the sale are the Nats.
Now, with our strong Aussie dollar, lets see if we can buy a couple hundred square k's of China?
(Crickets chirping?)
@ sid, any idea of the sale price ? was cubby station in a lot of debt, let me guess the buyers were chinese.......
Chinese Japanese consortium, Shandong Ruyi.
I believe they were in administration. This will end that.
Also, I think the sale was/is contingent upon approval by the FIRB but as Wayne Swan has signed off on it, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion.
Price was kept secret but rumoured to be in the vicinity of $250-300 mil, but well below what the administrators had hoped to get.
that's it Zen, of course Campbell Newman was all for it.
I wonder about these and similar land grabs. For example could a foreign entity buy Sth Johnstone sugar refinery, then buy the export jetty at Mourilyan. They own the land, the water, the crop, the refinery, the export facility. Complete the whole cycle at a loss, "sell" finished product to themsleves for $1, and bypass our tax system. Can they sidestep the rules and regs that are killing our own domestic operators ?
yeah spot on Vic, debt, banks, administrators, foreigners... there goes another one, it's all to fimiliar.
but in the case of Cubbie, how they came about controlling the 51 water licenses in the first palce fully stunk.
That place should have been shut down years ago. Why the SA, NSW, VIC and or Fed goverments didnt buy the place and return the water to the river system is beyond me. They talk about the 150 jobs that would be under threat if the sale doesnt go ahead, What about the 1000s and 1000s of people that have jobs that rely on the water that place steals from the system in the first place. Sacrifice 150 jobs up there for the sake of thousands more down south, not to mention the environmental benefits, makes sense to me. But as always the northern states could not give a shit about us at the lower end of the river. Same as it ever was. Hey Barnaby kiss my arse.
i work in tourism. i get opinions from all over the world on a daily basis. from a govermnet official in kiwi land.. i found out they are doing the exact same thing in NZ. Buying out Dairys for the Water licenses. they are not interested in the land or the produce as so much the water license. buying water for future usage.
The Chinese now own Day Dream island, sale price of $30 mill.
@willywag…it was not Barnaby. You may wish to find out what Penny Wong did re the water entitlements. If you remember it was Swan (Labor) who approved this sale to the Chinese.
Granted water is an important resource so why is it so hard for all to agree on building dams ?
Selling the farm, and it's water - the source of life.
Cubbie Station, located near Dirranbandi, Australia, is the largest privately owned (Cubbie Group) irrigation property in the southern hemisphere.
The station was created by amalgamating 12 floodplain properties to give Cubbie a total of 51 water licences. Its huge water storage dams stretch for more than 28 km along the Culgoa River, part of the Murray-Darling system. In an average year the Station uses 200,000 megaliters of water, in a good year as much as 500,000 megalitres.
The water is used to supply 130 km² of irrigated cotton and other crops including wheat.
The station is licenced to take 460,000 megalitres. It is the equivalent of all irrigation entitlements downstream in north-western NSW. The property has the capacity to grow 200 km² of cotton.
Cubbie is the headwater of the Murray-Darling basin, supplying water feed that by rights should nourish the system, and farming, all the way down to the Coorong.
Bought by foreign entity with capital sourced at half the cost of here in Aust.
This is wrong, just plain wrong.