Invasion of The Gold Coast

By Jeff Penberthy

"Ah, Queensland, beautiful one day, perfect the next," burbles a middle-aged vacationer in a tourist ad for the state in northeastern Australia that has one of the country's most glorious coastlines. In a version written by Australian Comic Gerry Connolly for a TV comedy show, a beaming Japanese businessman delivers the punch line, "Ah, Queensland, beautiful one day, Japanese the next!"

The joke is no laughing matter for Australians, who find themselves alternately pleased and troubled by a $6.4 billion Japanese plunge into Australian real estate over the past three years, primarily in urban hotels and shoreline properties, and by a 48% upsurge, to 215,600, in Japanese visitors in 1987. Last February, for the first time, Japanese arriving in Australia outnumbered tourists from any other country. According to a report by Lloyds Bank, 70% of land earmarked for development on Queensland's Gold Coast, a 25-mile strip of sun and fun, is controlled by Japanese interests.

On the face of it, Japan's growing involvement in their country should be good news for Australians: solid investors, solid tourist dollars, solid profits for all. Yet young Queenslanders in particular are voicing fears that they will eventually become part of a service class of waiters and cabdrivers for wealthy Asians.

The investment wave, driven by Japan's wealth and the power of the yen, has pushed real estate values beyond the reach of many Australian investors and has put Japanese companies in control of 18 major hotels and resorts. EIE Takahashi, which paid $110 million to acquire Sydney's Regent Hotel, has Australian investments valued at $400 million. Daikyo has poured $560 million into Australian property, including the Gold Coast International Hotel and the Brisbane Hilton.

When Japanese and Hong Kong investors began buying prime shoreline property along Sydney Harbor late last year, the Australian government, citing home- buyer reaction against skyrocketing property prices, imposed limits on foreign investment in some areas. At the same time, however, Australia tried to assure the Japanese that it still supported the "special relationship" between the two countries that was envisioned by the 1976 Nara Treaty and other accords. In meetings last month with visiting Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, Prime Minister Bob Hawke acknowledged strains but told his guest that the "vast majority of Australians welcome you."

Despite such reassurances, a plan inspired by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry to build a satellite city for retired Japanese expatriates on Australia's east coast seems to have been shelved. When a Japanese company earlier this year bought Brisbane's Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, a ranking tourist attraction, 1,300 angry Gold Coasters jammed a protest meeting. Reported Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent Tsuneo Sugishita: "I was seized by the illusion that I was attending an anti-Japanese rally in a country at war with Japan."

One spectator remarked that the meeting reminded him of Nazi rallies in prewar Germany, and its organizer, New Zealander Bruce Whiteside, 54, agreed. "He's dead right, and that's something that worries me," said Whiteside. "The crowd was in the palm of my hand." Whiteside's organization, known as Heart of a Nation, seeks to alter the federal constitution to prevent non- Australians from owning property; it wants the government to take over foreign holdings and lease them back to the former owners.

Several Australian businessmen with links to Japanese interests are warning that Japan will simply "abandon" Australia if it is made to feel unwelcome. Says Gordon Douglas, a director of PRD Realty on the Gold Coast: "The Japanese have multiple options. Most countries are falling over themselves to attract Japanese capital and expertise."

A more optimistic view is taken by Peter Drysdale, the executive director of the Australia-Japan Research Center at Australian National University in Canberra. The Japanese have also faced heated opposition to their investments in Hawaii and California, says Drysdale, and he doubts that they are rattled by the cool receptions they are getting Down Under.

With reporting by Frank Robson/Brisbane