Friday, March 20, 2009 1:41 AM
Hello Senator Joyce, thank god someone in Canberra is finally going to bat for the Australian people, because as sure as green apples Swan and his ilk are not. This current rubber stamp brigade have more or less signed off one major foreign ownership deal for each week they have been in office. Indeed, so far have proved every bit as bad as Howards lot who were equally bent on selling Australia’s savings bank – it’s future.
Look at it like the Nauru syndrome, where one day in the future, we will be cored out. Though of course it will be a problem left for future generations because our current custodians, will not, cannot - think and act beyond a single political term. And as for long term country building strategy, forget it
The point is, Australian politicians since post WW1 have focussed their efforts on digging up our land and selling it, our assets - at least the valuable bits, and have never applied any large scale effort towards making the country smarter. Rather, we are little more than a quarry for the rest of the world, and at the rate it has been going for too many decades, have been losing ownership and control of the principal assets we have – our quarries.
To bear out our lack of smartness: Do conduct a search for an Australian company of size selling smart 21st century things or services to the rest of the world. By this, I mean any company large enough to make a dent in our GDP. There’s none, not a one. Sure, plenty of global minnows, but nothing of size.
Indeed, to make it worse with all this digging we do, we don’t even make our own shovels, we buy them off Komatsu or Caterpillar, yet we have BHP, the worlds largest mining company here, and are regarded one of the top mining nations of the world, which clearly isn’t true – Destinations, yes, - Nations, no
Whereas Finland, with its population of a mere 5 million. Well it makes and sells Nokia phones and other smart things the world wants to buy. Then there’s the, SKF and Saab Aerospace brands from next door, also little old Israel up to its eyebrows in smart electronics and high value add weapons systems the world wants. And locally, we have a tiny island called Singapore, who are working on finding the worlds highest tech solutions for a raft of medical complaints and other supremely high value-add fixes the world will need. Which means, that one day we will be forced into buying $1000 pills from them to alleviate our pain. Then of course there is their airline business, their worlds largest container port, and their Telco industry. Singapore, a small island - Well managed though.
Others can be added to the list, especially that Penny Black of the worlds banking and finance industry – Switzerland, who have zero assets by way of mineral resources, yet are giants in the mining game. Indeed, they own a very large chunk of Australia, where Swiss intellect provides plenty of digging work for the locals. Jobs, if you like. Not much more though.
Senator Joyce - with this in mind, may I comment on your own words – ie: ““increase its stake in one of Australia’s largest mining companies Rio Tinto “
Australia’s largest mining companies ? Yet the Chinese bought their stake in London
Yes, RIO do have a sub branch listed here, but their head office is in London(do remember their supreme honcho had to make the long trek out here recently) and one day when Australia is all cored out, as it inevitably will be, the London head office will carry on with it’s business elsewhere in the world.
Meanwhile, the RIO branch in Australia, never having been predicated on anything but a passing fling with the locals, will be consigned to a single office suite located in a back lane in downtown Melbourne. Ala, Cecil Rhodes and his forays into Africa, as far as long term country building missions were concerned.
A cursory look around will find that every man and his dog already controls a huge chunk of Australia’s natural resources. Indeed, name the worlds miners and they have already tied up most of our natural assets. The Chinese government are simply late to the table, that is their sin. Save for the fact they don’t want to sell the stuff to the rest of the world, they want it exclusively for their own. Which, of course is at odds with our so called free-trade thinking
Free trade means that anything is for sale, anyone can use Australia as a quarry, just offer us a few jobs, and the place is yours. Conservation of our natural assets and provision for future generations never enters the discussion. The here and now is all that matters… We owe no responsibility for those yet to be born, just turn up on our shores, offer us some industry and jobs, then extract Australia’s mineral wealth as rapidly as possible. Leaving others suffer the burden when it is gone
One would think it is well overdue that a line was drawn in the sand.
For instance, we are told we have endless coal reserves - rubbish statements of the first order, when say, one takes a look at Hunter Valley NSW coal reserves, mined since the mid 1800’s.
As it stands, predictions based on current rates of extraction suggest it will be all gone within 35 years – Sooner if extraction rates are increased. http://www.hcec.org.au/node/163
And as with peak oil matching its target date in 2005, global supplies of natural gas will follow within a decade, Say 2015. Then there is the latest German report on global coal – 2015 should also see its peak
This fiction that we have endless mineral resources has to end, especially with the Chinalco discussion, where there is ample evidence to suggest China is hoarding its own resources. Coal, for instance, whereby their own high grade reserves are multiples of anything Australia could ever hope to offer, yet China hoards their own. As they are doing with rare earths.. Yet on this score, they posses 80% of the worlds known deposits. Indeed, try them on for a long term rare earth contract - it simply won’t happen
Also, the very word “production” reeks of human conceit when it comes to mining.(and fishing for that matter). Miners produce nothing, they “extract”. They grow nothing, they remove natural resources the planet has taken hundreds of million of years to create, never to be renewed again…at least on human timescale.
Thus the notion of our god given natural resources being treated as a “savings bank”, opposed to a crop.
For some odd reason, we have had a long standing policy that Australia is an open door for resource extraction, and to close it,- even in a small way, would be very damaging to our reputation. In my view this official policy is flawed and it is about time we took stock of our own needs….especially those of generations yet to come.
From the above, one might gather there is a far bigger set of questions that need addressing than the immediacy of the RIO/Chinalco issue, and they concern the way this country is politically lead, where the overwhelming evidence suggests that strategic planning for the long term is non existent.
Rather, future generations will have to fend for themselves. With Chinalco, we don’t just have a Sovereign Wealth Fund issue in the here-and-now, we have far deeper matters to confront
I for one, want my country back