Facts count, because what's mined is yours

By far the biggest development in the economy in recent years is the mining boom, and it's likely to roll on for at least the rest of this decade. But Australians are having a lot of trouble getting their minds around the boom's implications. The area abounds with worries and misperceptions.

Economists keep banging on about the mining boom because it's the biggest factor driving the economy's growth. We've had a surge in export income because the world is paying such high prices for our coal and iron ore. And we're also getting huge spending on the construction of new mines and natural gas facilities.

The other reason economists get so excited about the topic is that this is hardly the first commodities boom Australia has experienced (the first was the gold rush) and most of our previous booms have ended in tears. We've quickly spent all the extra money coming our way, but that's led to rapidly rising prices. The authorities' efforts to stamp out inflation have ended up causing a recession and rising unemployment.

The present managers of the economy are determined to ensure that doesn't happen this time by keeping spending and inflation under control. This explains why, until recently, the Reserve Bank was always thinking about putting up interest rates, and why the Gillard government has been so keen to get its budget back into surplus.

But all the fuss people like me have been making about the boom has left many Australians with a quite exaggerated impression of the size of our mining sector. According to a poll conducted by the Australia Institute, on average people imagine mining accounts for 35 per cent of the goods and services the nation produces (gross domestic product).

But while mining's share of national production has increased significantly in recent years, it's still up to only 10 per cent.

Many of us see the main pay-off from an expanding industry as all the jobs it generates. So what proportion of the workforce is employed in mining? According to the Australia Institute's polling, our average answer is 16 per cent.

The truth? Even after all that expansion, less than 2 per cent. How could an industry responsible for 10 per cent of our production account for just 2 per cent of employment? By being intensely ''capital-intensive'' - by using a lot of machines and not many workers.

So, does that mean mining isn't really worth all the fuss? A lot of its industrial rivals will tell you so, but it ain't true. The true test of the worth of an industry is not how many people it employs but how much income it generates. And, particularly at present, mining is generating huge income. Do you realise it accounts for more than half the nation's export income?

The reason income trumps employment is that as income is spent it generates jobs. When you spend a dollar it percolates through the economy, supporting and creating jobs as it goes. So if mining creates 10 per cent of national income but only 2 per cent of national employment directly, that just means it supports another 8 per cent of national employment indirectly, in other (labour-intensive) industries.

Which other industries? For the most part, service industries. How can I be sure? Because after you allow for the 2 per cent of Australians employed in mining, the 3 per cent in agriculture and the 9 per cent in manufacturing, the remaining 86 per cent are employed in the many service industries: wholesaling and retailing (15 per cent), healthcare (11 per cent), construction (9 per cent), education and training (8 per cent), the professions (8 per cent), hospitality (7 per cent), public administration (6 per cent), financial and business services (6 per cent), transport (5 per cent) and many more.

Another reason I can be sure most of the jobs created indirectly by mining are in the services sector is that, for at least the past 40 years, all the net increase in national employment has come from the services sector.
Am I touching a nerve here? A lot of people are uncomfortable about the mining boom because they see it as temporary and they see digging stuff out of the ground as a pretty unsophisticated way to make a living. What do we do when it's over and what else do we do to make a buck?

It's true the sky-high prices we're getting at present won't last, but nor will they crash back to what we used to get. And we'll have a much bigger mining industry selling a lot more of the stuff than we used to. They may be non-renewable resources, but we've got a mighty lot of 'em.

What else can we do? What most of us have always done: sell services to one another and to foreigners. In these days of the information and communication revolution, most of the highly skilled, highly paid jobs are in the services sector. Those who find this intangibility discomforting are hankering after a bygone century.

It is true, however, that we must ensure we end up with something to show for this boom and that too much of the huge profit being made doesn't just end up in the hands of the mining industry's owners (about 80 per cent of whom are foreign). After all, the minerals they're mining are owned by all Australians, not the miners.

That's why it's good to see Julia Gillard's profit-based mining tax finally being passed by the House of Representatives, even though Tony Abbott's mindless opposition to it allowed the three big foreign mining companies to butcher the tax.

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The price we would pay for keeping the farm

According to the Greens, the mining industry is 83 per cent foreign-owned. And their anxiety is matched by Senator Barnaby Joyce's worries about foreigners buying up rural land in NSW. But how concerned should we be about "selling off the farm" and what could we do about it?

The Greens' claims have not gone unchallenged. According to the Minerals Council, official figures show mining is actually 71 per cent foreign-owned. The Greens say BHP Billiton is 76 per cent foreign-owned, but the correct figure seems to be 60 per cent.

No one's disputing, however, that Rio Tinto is 83 per cent foreign-owned and Xstrata is totally foreign-owned. And even if the mining industry overall is "only" 71 per cent foreign-owned, that's still a remarkably high proportion.

What's more, the funding for the present huge expansion in the mining sector, which is likely to continue for quite a few years, is safe to come mainly from foreigner investors. If so, their share of the ownership of our mining companies is bound to go higher.

So why don't we just pass a law prohibiting foreigners from buying Australian mines and farms - or at least limiting foreign purchases in some way?

Sorry, it ain't that simple. Before we did that, we'd need to be sure we were prepared to pay the price of keeping what's left of Australia in Australian hands.

All spending on new physical investment - whether on homes, business equipment, mines and other structures, or public infrastructure - has to be financed by saving. For every $1 billion we invest this year, the money has to come from somewhere and, in fact, it has to come from us saving $1 billion this year.

The saving can be done by households, by companies retaining some of their after-tax profits, or by governments raising more in revenue than they spend on recurrent purposes. There's just one escape clause: we can also finance our investment spending by using the savings of foreigners.

We can either borrow from them - thereby adding to Australia's foreign debt - or we can sell them some Australian asset: real estate, an existing business, shares bought on the stock exchange or the right to set up a new business with their own money.

If we borrow their savings, the money will have to be repaid in due course, and we'll have to pay interest to them. If, instead, we sell off part of the farm, the after-tax profits the foreigners make from their share of the business will belong to them. They can either reinvest those profits in the business (which will increase the amount of the farm they own) or take them out of the country.

The Greens estimated that, over the next five years, the foreign owners of our mining companies will be entitled to after-tax profits of $265 billion, but will reinvest four dollars in every five, taking home only about $50 billion.

I'm not sure how accurate those figures are, but they do illustrate a point about which everyone agrees: a very high proportion of the big profits foreigners are making from our mining sector is being ploughed back into expanding the sector.

Does all this shock you? It's been going on, year after year, pretty much since white settlement. Because this is a big country packed with natural wealth, but with a relatively small population, Australians have never saved enough to finance all the abundant opportunities for economic development and enrichment.

So we've always invited foreigners - first the British, then the Americans, then the Japanese and now, to some extent, the Chinese - to bring their capital to Australia and join us in fully exploiting our nation's potential.

In other words, we've always been a "capital-importing" country. We've almost always run a surplus on the capital account of our balance of (international) payments, with more foreign capital funds flowing in than Australian capital funds flowing out. These funds include borrowed money and money for the purchase of physical assets and businesses ("equity" capital).

(It's worth remembering, though, that in recent decades we have had a lot of Australian money flowing out as our superannuation funds have invested in foreign shares and bonds, and Australian transnational corporations have expanded abroad. So while the rest of the world has been acquiring more of Australia, we've be acquiring more of the rest of the world.)

If we almost always run a surplus on the capital account of the balance of payments, it follows as a matter of arithmetic that we run an exactly offsetting deficit on the current account of the balance of payments. Thus the capital account surplus allows our exports to exceed our imports and covers the cost of our net payments of interest and dividends to the foreign suppliers of capital.

But why have we always invited foreigners to bring their savings to Australia and participate in the economic development of our nation? Because of our impatience to be richer, our desire to raise our material standard of living.

And because, as part of that, we've always been confident we were getting our fair share of the benefits. Any profits the foreigners make, we tax. Any minerals they extract from our land, we charge them royalties (though, with world commodities prices so high at present, probably not enough, which is what the new mining tax is about). But the benefits of economic activity exceed the profits made. It also generates a lot of jobs, directly and indirectly. Those jobs go mainly to Australians and help feed their families.

We could perhaps borrow more from foreigners so as to reduce their ownership of our real estate and businesses, but there are limits to how far debt can substitute for equity and limits to how much debt the nation should take on.

So if we want to impose new restrictions on how much foreigners own, it's pretty safe to involve less economic development, slower economic growth than we were expecting and a more slowly rising standard of living.

That wouldn't worry me much, but many people would see it differently. Point is: don't imagine restricting foreign ownership would come without a price to be paid.

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