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August 7, 2011
What is good for the mining industry is good for Australia. Or so we are told by the spin merchants. We know that Australian governments, both state and federal, have a strong vested interest in the continued extraction of mineral resources. The reasons are simple: they assume that Australia’s economic future lies underneath our feet and that Quarry Australia is the means to ensure prosperity in a global world.
However, the history of mining suggests otherwise.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, mine tailings, Andamooka
The consequences are often lunar landscapes, poisoned landscapes, limited environmental restoration and minimal site rehabilitation. These are some of the environmental and social costs of “Quarry Australia”.
'Some', because the mining industry has an explicit political agenda. It is in the denial camp of global warming and is anti-the carbon tax and mining tax, and in favour of regime change in Canberra. The Gillard Government is bankrupting the country and placing the resource industry at risk, and reducing Australia's international competitiveness.
Big Mining is a core part of the conservative power bloc whose views are represented by the politics of The Australian newspaper: pro markets, mining, industry and business; anti-big government, high taxation, central planning and regulation. It sees the Gillard government as weak (because it is a minority government) and it is too beholden to The Greens. Regime change cannot come quick enough.
The mining strand of conservatism is a one that is denationalizing bits and pieces of Australia's national system. These global firms global operations space that is at least partly inserted in the countries that comprise the global economy. They need private property protections and guarantees of contracts from each of the states involved in the context of an increasingly formalized global economy (eg., the World Trade Organization). Such an economy is increasingly dominated by deregulation, privatization, and the growing authority of non-state actors.
Gina Rinehart of Hancock Prospecting explicitly pushes this process of denationalizing the bits and pieces of Australia's national system in a specific direction. She says:
After the shock to exploration investment in Australia that the carbon tax and MRRT have caused, Australia needs some innovative vision to restore investment confidence. We need to learn from and follow China’s and other countries examples of special economic zones, economic zones with less tax and less regulations and that are welcoming to investment and growth.
The transboundary dynamics and formation that Rinehart has in mind take the form of northern economic zone encompassing regional Western Australia and Queensland; a zone with low tax rates, lots of incentives and minimal environmental regulation of entrepreneurs; and deep interlocking cross border networks to China and Asia.
This embeddiness of the global deep inside the nation state would produce its own form of authority that would enable national mining capital to become global capital. This requires the nation state---ie., Canberra---to act both as the ultimate guarantor of the "rights" of global capital and also to incorporate into itself the global project of its own shrinking role in regulating economic transactions and reducing the tax required to pay for public services.
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The IPA (Institute for Public Affairs) says reducing taxes and regulation across the north would stimulate development and population growth.
It supports the north of Western Australia and Queensland becoming a lower-tax economic zone covering the whole of the north.
This was needed to ensure the resource sector remained globally competitive in the face of growing competition from Africa and South America for the Chinese market.