Auctioneer unhappy with Current Affair story on property buyers
He was shown conducting a house auction in both English & Mandarin, but an auctioneer has accused ACA of misrepresentation.
- Published by David Knox
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An auctioneer filmed for a segment of A Current Affair has accused the show of misrepresentation.
Robert Ding was depicted conducting a Melbourne auction in Mandarin, in a story that reported first home buyers were missing out to ‘Chinese buyers taking over the housing market.’
The report showed he spoke both English and Mandarin for the benefit of the Chinese property developers, although it didn’t indicate they were also locals.
All four bidders of a Mont Albert North property were property developers. It sold for $1,381,000.
“They interviewed me for an hour but only used five seconds of it, so obviously they didn’t agree with what I said,” he told Fairfax.
“I said sure there are a lot of Chinese buyers around, but many of them are locals.
“But what we are finding is that the market the Chinese are buying in has no effect on first home buyers because first home buyers can’t afford that sort of property.”
Elsewhere in the story another resident spoke about Chinese property developers “invading” their neighbourhoods at the expense of the “Great Aussie Dream.” A map showed suburbs popular with Chinese buyers.
ACA‘s website now has over 100 comments, many of whom call on the government to step up foreign ownership laws.
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9 Responses
The core subject ie: domestic housing and the effects of foreign investors on local buyers is a very legitimate topic. However, ACA as usual ignored the opportunity to investigate and report a real story and ended up with a non-story which was misrepresented in their promos.
PJC border security really just shows arrogant and/or clueless people bringing in prohibited foods and its basically bulk foods from their home country. What else are they supposed to film in our airports if that’s the main issue occurring? These border shows are made in every country.
i guess he didnt watch much ACA before he agreed to do the program, its a bit laughable when these people seem to be shocked that they’ve been misrepresented after the fact.
Unfortunately I have to keep apologising to friends in Asia about racist Austrslian media reports.
This is exactly why I don’t watch ACA or TT all they are doing is whipping up hysteria over unfounded xenophobic attitudes… hope to see this on Media Watch soon!
The promo they had for this story was along the lines of “Forget The Block, this is The Wok”, which is completely ridiculous. It was so blatantly racist that it almost sounded satirical. Almost.
Negative gearing has a bigger impact on first home buyers. But you can’t be xenophobic about that so I doubt ACA would bother.
And they say Australia is not xenophobic. This sort of drivel from programmes such as ACA, Border Security and the like really don’t further this country in any way.
Cue Media Watch. The promo they ran for this story was pathetic also.