The benefits of mining or not, in Boomtown, WA

Mining, then, rather problematically assumes the status of Great New Hope for Aboriginal People. Such a mantle ignores the diversity of indigenous groups, assumes a monolithic “solution” will fix a loosely defined problem, and rather conveniently lets State, Federal and Territory governments off the hook.

It must be acknowledged that the resources industry is an easy target for glib critique. Issues are rarely as simple as environment v mining or traditional owners v mining: progressives and conservatives alike paint skewed pictures of complicated disputes. Some devotees of “the free flow of capital” have accused commentators on the “mining boom” of expressing an “elitist snobbery towards miners”.

The problem is not the industry itself, so much as our inflated expectations of what it can achieve. Reports about the “downside of the boom” are newsworthy because they are deemed counterintuitive - man bites dog; resources boom fails to deliver equitable levels of wealth. The question is: how surprising is it that the “trickle-down” theory fails to fulfil its promise? Do we really expect mining companies - whose primary purpose is the generation of wealth for their shareholders - to further an egalitarian state or “solve” ongoing post-colonial problems, without some kind of regulatory nudge in the right direction? Whether with respect to mining or any other area of wealth creation, the news that market capitalism does not automatically lead to equality of outcomes is hardly earth-shattering.

The past few decades have seen a gradual blurring of the roles of government and private industry in Australia; under neoliberal thought, the former ought to contract to allow the latter to flourish. It is worth restating that it is the role of government, rather than of industry, to safeguard citizens’ rights and their ability to enjoy those rights on an equal basis. This is not to say that private industry is a pernicious force; merely to acknowledge, as did humanities academic David McKnight in his 2005 book Beyond Right and Left, that markets “require a strong framework of law and civil society to restrain their dynamic but destructive tendencies”.

The reports quoted above indicate that what is good for mining companies isn’t necessarily good for all of us. What is often skirted around, however, is the fact that a buoyant economy will not, absent government intervention, reward all Australians equally either. The boom raises questions about what kind of society we want, about the concept of equality and the role of government in achieving it. In WA as elsewhere, our egalitarian self-image needs more than a bright new coat of paint in time for Australia Day: it requires some serious examination.