Sections of the business media seem to be suffering selective xenophobia: raising angst about Chinese investment in Australia’s mining but no comment whatsoever about a big property buy-up by a German property fund.

Stockland has announced the sale of its Edmund Barton Building in Canberra to Munich-based Real I.S., which has acquired property worth over $1 billion in Australia in the past four years.

Real I.S. is paying $186 million for the heritage-listed, Harry Seidler-designed Edmund Barton building on Kings Avenue in the parliamentary triangle.

Completed in 1974, the building was originally called the Trade Group Offices and housed the Department of Trade. Later it was the location of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and until recently the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

After a fabulously exorbitant fit-out costing more than $110 million it will be the new headquarters of the Australian Federal Police and become known by ACT wags as “Keelty Towers”.

The AFP will consolidate six existing sites and locate 2000 staff at the new HQ.

Stockland, whose deputy chairman is former NSW Premier Nick Greiner, has now sold a total of $1.27 billion worth of retail, office and industrial assets since late 2007 with a further $95 million of sales exchanged, subject to settlement.

If there are undisclosed “national security” issues in selling mining assets to the Chinese, what about flogging the AFP HQ to the Germans?

Not many years ago the prospect of a German company owning the premises of the federal police would have caused apoplexy in the RSL and Liberal grandees would have been sending for the smelling salts.

How times change.