While the National Party continues to lie and duck shove, and Whaleoil continues to smugly write about “chinky names”, the evidence mounts that the real estate market in many Western cities is being driven by Chinese communists buying with hot money,

Vancouver provides the evidence. The city had a 13 per cent foreign investor rate last year, with many apartments sitting vacant because overseas owners weren’t renting them out. After government imposed a 15 per cent tax on foreign investment last August foreign investment in British Columbia is now as little as four per cent.

House prices in the area fell 5.3 per cent in November. The largest monthly decline since 2012. From January 2016 to January 2017 house prices in Vancouver fell 18.9 per cent.

Meanwhile in Beijing a senior Chinese policeman has been jailed for 17 years for embezzling money to buy two Australian homes for his two daughters. Wang Jun Ren, 59, was the police chief of Guta District of Jinzhou City in Liaoning province, when he began asking a local property developer for millions of Chinese yuan to pay for the Australian real estate purchases for his family.

In return, he outsourced up to 20 construction projects to the property developer, including the construction of police stations, Chinese court documents show. Wang was convicted of corruptly taking 174million yuan by himself, and another 24,800 yuan with his wife, taking bribes of 680million yuan, and having a huge amount of property of unknown source. That trial was held in December.

The jail sentence comprised of four years for corruption, 12 years for bribe taking, and four years for the unknown funding source of a huge number of properties.

Policeman Wang is only the tip of the iceberg. With China populated by millions of corrupt Communist officials, this is what local buyers are meant to compete with.

Operation Fox Hunt.