Thank you all for your responses.Australia will have trouble...

Thank you all for your responses.

Australia will have trouble sustaining its standard of living and full employment unless it starts to value add off the back of mining ... but it needs good leaders in the mining industry and politicians to get off their backsides.
Some vision!!

We need to maximise our one and only strength - mining - by value adding to it.

So unlike Australia, Brazil for example has steel mills next door to its iron ore mining operations - so they are not just exporting iron ore, they are producing steel too.

Producing steel is not labour intensive (in regards to tons of steel produced per worker) - so China does not really have an unfair advantage by exploiting lower wages - so we should be able to make steel cheaper than we can import it back from China... after first sending it across to them as iron ore... so we are saving 2 boat trips.

instead of earning $100/ton of iron ore suddenly we'll be earning $1,000/ton of steel products (10 x as much).

Why aren't we value adding or thinking about it?

Steel was just one example .. obviously we will need lots of power to smelt - so we will draw on energy sources.
It just keeps value adding .. we might support a larger ship building industry too and perhaps cover all our steel needs and start exporting steel around the world even.?

Why not ?