I am guessing ROW is "Rest Of the World"? I am having a little problem following the thread on this discussion because there seems to be different conversations going on at once. Now assuming that I am understanding at what you are driving....
With respect to your observation of Oz and EV's, however, the issue I suggest is a range issue at heart. Oz is the size of the US with a population of greater NY, primarily in 7 cities dotted around the coast with very, very large distances separating them - with some of those distances covering lands with life threatening environmental conditions ( water/heat ). When EV's can reliably travel those distances (in the popular perception) EV's wil be more attractive. While the cities might seem an obvious place for EV success, most of the 7 big cities now have intentionally prohibitive garaging costs, designed to push ppl into public transport, and on street parking in the inner suburbs - both of which interfere with the idea of driving to work and charging, or charging over night. Further the politically driven suppression of coal fired tech has pushed power prices up, so electricity is not seen as cheap (at the moment). These factors suggest that EV's in Oz are not necessarily seen by the masses as the most suitable transport option.
Power storage is, however, a very likely success for lithium here - precisely because of the shift from coal to renewable power generation, and the aging demographic, and reasonably iffy public transport networks will make EV's very attractive as they become reliably self driving. Likewise as range increases EV's will lift in perceived advantage augmented by their supposedly lower maintenance costs which will prove attractive in a country with high labour costs.
However, the Oz economy is essentially an export economy - we have not for a long time been driven by local demand in our major industries, but by export demand - minerals, food, textile raw materials, tourism and even research (we tend to license other countries to develop, make sell what we invent).
I think our investor base is similarly oriented to expectation that local demand is not as important for our products as overseas demand. The average Oz'ian tends to know as much, if not more about foreign countries as we know about Oz, similarly we tend to travel overseas before we explore our own country.
Lastly, the major investment players are in fact the super funds ( retirement pension plans) which having been receiving 10 to 14% of annual salaries for about 30 years and now represent possibly the biggest block of investment cash in the economy, and which driven by their need to make returns to fund both retirement streams and shareholders, tend to be internationally or dividend stream focused, and risk averse.
Combine all these factors with extremely good border control which constrains population growth, and I suspect local consumer demand for EV's in Oz is not a critical factor in the success of Li investments - although undeniably, a wide local EV consumer base would make market SP manipulation that much harder to achieve and Li Ore producer SP prices more predictable.
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