With all this disruption and discussion on transport costs etc,...

With all this disruption and discussion on transport costs etc, it does bring into question why we don't do the high level processing of some of these minerals in Australia. With Australia's renewable energy resources, if these processes truly want to be sustainable, why shouldn't we be doing it here - long term we should be in a very strong relative position? Is the processing in places like Asia that much cheaper than Australia in the long term?

The higher the value of the product you are shipping the less you are exposed to the vagaries of the transport market. To me it seems like the sort of thing the government should be helping to set up. The more we process the high level materials the more it promotes downstream activity, the more value add.