Antinuclear

Australia should not become just the land of quarries and waste dumops

We will all pay for that when the global miners are gone – or we won’t be able to afford to pay for a clean-up at all and just leave the holes in the ground.

Curse of The Resource Rich may Befall Us, Sydney Morning Herald, MARTIN FEIL, April 30, 2010

The government and the media generally promote Australia’s resources boom as a blessing for the economy in difficult global times. Our land seems to be regarded as a magic pudding that will never stop feeding our growing population. All we have to do is dig.

This view is wrong. Reliance on exports of resources and precious metals without value being added by a native workforce turns the resource blessing into a curse – witness resource-rich countries that have in the past experienced a high standard of living until their export revenues ended. They did nothing except dig it up. When the resources were exhausted, they reverted to undeveloped economies with no hope of industrialisation……..
Cursed resource-rich countries commonly perform worse than the rest of the industrialised world. Ecological issues (including climate change) leave the economy with a substantial clean-up cost. We will all pay for that when the global miners are gone – or we won’t be able to afford to pay for a clean-up at all and just leave the holes in the ground.
This lazy and stupid philosophy is combined with a prevailing and long-held view that shareholders in a resources or land-owning company have the sole right to benefit from what’s under their ground, and that it is worthless until you extract it. The extraction process needs capital and most of the capital has to be found overseas……..I hope the government’s decisions on the upcoming Henry tax report aren’t a fait accompli. Any major concessions to the international mining industry will leave some ripples from the resources curse that will be felt long after the present government has shuffled off.

Curse of The Resource Rich

April 30, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, business, climate change - global warming, energy, uranium | antinuclear, Australia, climate change, climate change - global warming, energy, uranium