0/5

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.

2014-11-01_2331An 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.

9 Responses

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

Leave a Reply