Victoria was built on the back of the mining industry.
Today the industry's contribution is more modest.
It is dominated by brown coal mining and mainly-offshore gas and oil, and is about the size of the dairy industry.
Earlier mining activities mean the Victorian industry is unlikely to play a leading economic role again.
However, aside from bankrolling the state's modern economy, mining in Victoria has also left other important legacies with on-going benefits.
The first of these is Melbourne's hosting of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, two of the world's most important mining companies.
Secondly, and related to this, is the continued importance of the skills originally developed to service the local mining industry -- skills that have found a ready market around the world.
The original search for mineral wealth in Australia owed much to our legal environment.
Australia offered those who found a deposit the security that they could develop it, facing low and known levels of taxation.
These conditions were clarified in the 1850s, following the Eureka Stockade revolt against mining taxes.
Other places around the world, notwithstanding high mineral prospectivity, failed to match Australian mining development.
Lawlessness continues to be a barrier in some places. Compared with the situation in many African countries, the Kelly Gang look like some ill-disciplined schoolchildren.
Other countries have introduced risks of mineral expropriation.
Zimbabwe is the outstanding example.
The government there confiscated mineral leases which, together with its destruction of property rights in general, transformed a resource-rich economy into an international basket case.
South Africa has also faced criticism for its ''black economic empowerment'' regime, which some investors consider is moving along the road to expropriating their mining properties.
Elsewhere, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, new under-explored mining areas opened up. Much of this has proven to be unsatisfactory.
Russia has wrestled ownership of successful oil discoveries away from Shell and is in the process of taking similar steps against BP.
Some other former Soviet bloc governments markedly upped mining tax rates once a successful development had been proved.
Newmont Mining was Uzbekistan's largest foreign investor. Having discovered and developed a major gold mine in the 1990s, in 2006 it was hit with a major tax increase and saw its assets seized.
A similar situation is panning out in Mongolia, a sparsely populated country the size of Queensland.
The government there has introduced a 68 per cent ''windfall profits tax'' on some mines and is changing the terms previously negotiated with others, including one partly-owned by Rio Tinto.
''Windfall profits taxes'' will undermine investor confidence unless those affected are convinced they are one-off.
In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher got away, as British prime minister, with imposing a windfall tax on North Sea oil, but no government of ex-communists, as is the case with Mongolia, would have sufficient credentials to repeat that.
A mineral deposit once discovered is often very valuable, presenting huge temptations to acquisitive governments.
Nonetheless, this killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs seldom pays off. The Australian experience demonstrates how honest dealing by governments brings solid wealth creation.
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