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>> This might be about to change as Australia has an election due in the next few week. Unfortunately, the opposition is also backed by the CFMEU (Construction

>> This might be about to change as Australia has an election due in the next few week. Unfortunately, the opposition is also backed by the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union) which includes the Mining & Energy workers. As such, the opposition isn't likely to take action that threatens the jobs of union members. The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy, this represents a real challenge for any prospective government. We've already seen what happened to the Australian dollar when China's northern port of Dalian banned imports of Australian coal and will cap overall coal imports from all sources for 2019 at 12 million tonnes. Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. An obvious place to start would be to recreate the manufacturing industries that have all but been destroyed[1]. [1] Written as someone with an electronics manufacturing business in Australia.

hulahoof 7y ago
What do you manufacture if you don't mind me asking?
ClassyJacket 7y ago
"Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. " We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to every house and business... (The joke, for non-Australians, is that we had this, and it was under construction, but then the coal loving conservatives got in power and spent the same 70 billion dollars on installing copper phone line vDSL internet instead, which has actually been a downgrade for many people).
- broodbucket 7y ago
  Is it VDSL? We've had VDSL2 in Canberra for many years now (built privately) and it's better than most people's NBN.
  - ClassyJacket 7y ago
    Yes, fibre to the node uses VDSL, but with ridiculously long copper lengths, meaning only around 1/4 of premises can reach 100Mbps, some get less than 10, many are plagued with dropouts, and it can never be upgraded.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Gigabit is _massive_ overkill, that's the real dirty secret here. That plan was a colossal waste of Australia's resources. I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me. The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference. Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine. 8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better. 56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better) The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.
  - te_chris 7y ago
    Where is gigabit available in the UK? I live in Zone 2 in London and best I can get is Virgin's crappy, contended, DOCSIS rubbish. Back home in NZ I could get actual FTTP and it was fantastic.
    - jozzhart 7y ago
      I had Hyperoptic 1GB/s in Greenwich and was paying special offer of GBP7.5 / month. In regional Australia if pay $80 / month for 35MB/s (maximum line speed). I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
  - schappim 7y ago
    >> 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases Faster? I thought it was 40% slower. Please tell us more!
Arnt 7y ago
There's one thing I'm wondering about... I understand that the coal-friendly parties don't want to restrict mining. But what are they saying about export and demand and markets and all that? Coal has few friends on the buyer side. There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. What are the coal-friendly parties in Australia saying about that?
- catmanjan 7y ago
  I think the implication is that if that is what is going to happen, then that is capitalism solving the ethical problem for them - the government isn't running the mines and the companies will stop once they are no longer profitable.
- jussij 7y ago
  It is hard to know why the current Liberal government is such a coal-friendly party. My take on this is I think the Liberal party, which once took a centre right position has now been hijacked by the far right wing of the party. Many of these right wingers don't believe climate change is real and in fact the leader of that right wing faction has been quoted as saying 'climate change is crap'. > There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. Australian coal will be still be selling for many years to come, only because it is generally of a much higher quality than coal from other source. But it is definitely a dead end industry and the country would be wise to start moving away from coal as a source of income.
- roenxi 7y ago
  I'm not sure it has been publicly deabted to shake out who stands where, but probably a classic market-oriented position of "if people will buy it, we'll sell it. If not, we won't". Same as was applied to the manufacturing industry. Coal is used to make steel. Unless the mettalurgists have come up with something I don't know about that isn't going away any time soon - my understanding is that Queensland coal is mostly metallurgical. Victorian coal is too dodgy to export, so overseas buyers don't matter. NSW and the Hunter Valley are very exposed to the thermal market. They sink or swim based on how much gets burned in power generation.
- 7y ago
adrianN 7y ago
They could grow a solar panel and battery industry. Australia has lots of sunshine and empty land.
nutjob2 7y ago
I think you're overstating coal's influence on the Australian economy, bordering on hysteria. Mining somewhere in the range of $250B of which coal is roughly $50B, in a $1.5T economy. It's obviously significant but "Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy" is patently false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia
- BLKNSLVR 7y ago
  "Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy" That's pretty much the line that the current federal government are pushing though.
cam_l 7y ago
>The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Not so much. Certainly not in terms of employment or taxes. By and large the profits flow overseas, and once you make this exception, minerals account for only around 8-15% (depending on who you believe) of the economy.. and falling. And coal is only maybe a quarter of that. About the same as tourism, atually. And mining accounted for only around 3% of employment at the height of the boom (compared with 15%or so for tourism).
- schappim 7y ago
  >> Certainly not in terms of employment or taxes. You're right on both fronts, the mining companies are automating everything they can and whole political parties were formed to take an axe to the minerals resource rent tax! However in terms of exports, Minerals/Ores/Gems/Metals accounted for 64.4% of Australia's top 10 exports in 2018. Australia’s top 10 exports accounted about three-quarters (79.5%) of the overall value of its global shipments. [1]. [1] http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/
jpatokal 7y ago
Australia is a stupidly uncompetitive place to manufacture anything. A friend of mine is managing a (rare!) factory expansion in Sydney right now, and costs of all inputs (rent, labor, etc) are 3-8x what the company is paying in Malaysia.
- tibbydudeza 7y ago
  We in South Africa have the same issue due our location and the dependence on the export of natural resources. Our third biggest export is motor vehicles and parts mainly from VW/BMW/Mercedes Benz/Toyota but we dodged the Holden/Ford bullet by making cars that could be sold locally and worldwide.

hulahoof 7y ago

What do you manufacture if you don't mind me asking?

ClassyJacket 7y ago

"Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. " We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to every house and business... (The joke, for non-Australians, is that we had this, and it was under construction, but then the coal loving conservatives got in power and spent the same 70 billion dollars on installing copper phone line vDSL internet instead, which has actually been a downgrade for many people).

broodbucket 7y ago
Is it VDSL? We've had VDSL2 in Canberra for many years now (built privately) and it's better than most people's NBN.
- ClassyJacket 7y ago
  Yes, fibre to the node uses VDSL, but with ridiculously long copper lengths, meaning only around 1/4 of premises can reach 100Mbps, some get less than 10, many are plagued with dropouts, and it can never be upgraded.
tialaramex 7y ago
Gigabit is _massive_ overkill, that's the real dirty secret here. That plan was a colossal waste of Australia's resources. I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me. The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference. Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine. 8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better. 56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better) The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.
- te_chris 7y ago
  Where is gigabit available in the UK? I live in Zone 2 in London and best I can get is Virgin's crappy, contended, DOCSIS rubbish. Back home in NZ I could get actual FTTP and it was fantastic.
  - jozzhart 7y ago
    I had Hyperoptic 1GB/s in Greenwich and was paying special offer of GBP7.5 / month. In regional Australia if pay $80 / month for 35MB/s (maximum line speed). I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
- schappim 7y ago
  >> 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases Faster? I thought it was 40% slower. Please tell us more!

Arnt 7y ago

There's one thing I'm wondering about... I understand that the coal-friendly parties don't want to restrict mining. But what are they saying about export and demand and markets and all that? Coal has few friends on the buyer side. There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. What are the coal-friendly parties in Australia saying about that?

catmanjan 7y ago
I think the implication is that if that is what is going to happen, then that is capitalism solving the ethical problem for them - the government isn't running the mines and the companies will stop once they are no longer profitable.
jussij 7y ago
It is hard to know why the current Liberal government is such a coal-friendly party. My take on this is I think the Liberal party, which once took a centre right position has now been hijacked by the far right wing of the party. Many of these right wingers don't believe climate change is real and in fact the leader of that right wing faction has been quoted as saying 'climate change is crap'. > There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. Australian coal will be still be selling for many years to come, only because it is generally of a much higher quality than coal from other source. But it is definitely a dead end industry and the country would be wise to start moving away from coal as a source of income.
roenxi 7y ago
I'm not sure it has been publicly deabted to shake out who stands where, but probably a classic market-oriented position of "if people will buy it, we'll sell it. If not, we won't". Same as was applied to the manufacturing industry. Coal is used to make steel. Unless the mettalurgists have come up with something I don't know about that isn't going away any time soon - my understanding is that Queensland coal is mostly metallurgical. Victorian coal is too dodgy to export, so overseas buyers don't matter. NSW and the Hunter Valley are very exposed to the thermal market. They sink or swim based on how much gets burned in power generation.
7y ago

adrianN 7y ago

They could grow a solar panel and battery industry. Australia has lots of sunshine and empty land.

nutjob2 7y ago

I think you're overstating coal's influence on the Australian economy, bordering on hysteria. Mining somewhere in the range of $250B of which coal is roughly $50B, in a $1.5T economy. It's obviously significant but "Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy" is patently false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia

BLKNSLVR 7y ago
"Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy" That's pretty much the line that the current federal government are pushing though.

cam_l 7y ago

>The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Not so much. Certainly not in terms of employment or taxes. By and large the profits flow overseas, and once you make this exception, minerals account for only around 8-15% (depending on who you believe) of the economy.. and falling. And coal is only maybe a quarter of that. About the same as tourism, atually. And mining accounted for only around 3% of employment at the height of the boom (compared with 15%or so for tourism).

schappim 7y ago
>> Certainly not in terms of employment or taxes. You're right on both fronts, the mining companies are automating everything they can and whole political parties were formed to take an axe to the minerals resource rent tax! However in terms of exports, Minerals/Ores/Gems/Metals accounted for 64.4% of Australia's top 10 exports in 2018. Australia’s top 10 exports accounted about three-quarters (79.5%) of the overall value of its global shipments. [1]. [1] http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/ http://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/

jpatokal 7y ago

Australia is a stupidly uncompetitive place to manufacture anything. A friend of mine is managing a (rare!) factory expansion in Sydney right now, and costs of all inputs (rent, labor, etc) are 3-8x what the company is paying in Malaysia.

tibbydudeza 7y ago
We in South Africa have the same issue due our location and the dependence on the export of natural resources. Our third biggest export is motor vehicles and parts mainly from VW/BMW/Mercedes Benz/Toyota but we dodged the Holden/Ford bullet by making cars that could be sold locally and worldwide.