A 'Big' Western Australia?

Western Australians live in the biggest houses in the world (the average house size has doubled while occupants halved over the last half century). The average house price in WA recently rose to half a million dollars. As for that other major consumer item, WA has the highest vehicle ownership rates (75 per cent) in Australia, and the distance driven has been increasing (to nearly 8,000km per car in 2004).

When estimated in terms of ecological footprint (the amount of land needed to meet each person’s resource requirements) WA unsurprisingly rates very high. In 2001 the ecological footprint was 14.5 hectares, well above the national figure and very high when compared to the global level of 2 hectares.

The upshot of all this is that not only can WA not support the population rise suggested, according to any sense of fairness it shouldn’t. Such an increase would mean the perpetuation of grossly unfair resource distribution on a global scale.

The underlying cause of WA’s development has always been the availability of cheap fossil fuels to power the transport, industry, mining and agriculture that have formed the state economy. It was the combination of steam and the gold mining boom that got WA going in the 1890s, then the internal combustion engine and agriculture that kept it going after that until new transport technologies and the iron ore boom kicked in after the 1960s. Along the way jet engines made WA much closer to the eastern states and the rest of the world, easing the problem of isolation.

Now WA has itself become a major energy supplier, mostly in the form of gas but also uranium. There is currently a big debate about whether WA gas should be going to overseas markets as liquid gas, or kept for local use (right now 15 per cent is set aside for local use).  The gas is actually some way offshore (the Gorgon gas field is around 130 km of the north-west coast), ours by virtue of a treaty signed in the 1950s, and a recent report highlighted the security concerns in relation to this. China, already a major buyer of north-west gas, is building a blue water navy and was the focus of recent Defence White Paper on future strategy.

The uranium is inland and reserves - totalling around 193,000 tones or 5 per cent of the global total - will begin to be mined soon, perhaps this year. There has in the past been pressure for WA, with large tracts of geologically stable desert, to accept nuclear waste, and this is likely to happen. WA also has mineral sands, some of which (thorium) can be used as nuclear fuel.

The boom-bust economy that is driving high growth rates in WA has been criticised as a longer term prospect for economic reasons. Jon Sutton, Bankwest managing director, wrote in the West Australian that rather than relying on the resources sector alone, “(w)e need “State building” projects. Instead of squandering this bounty, we need to channel some of the receipts of our next period of growth into big infrastructure projects that benefit the State and create jobs in their own right.”

This comment is particularly apposite as much the state’s infrastructure is old and furthermore must be replaced in order to deal with the impact of global warming. A recent storm that knocked out electricity in nearly a quarter of all homes, brought down much of the telecommunications system and gridlocked the major roads network, all costing the major part of a billion dollars, showed just how vulnerable Perth is to such disruption.

Which brings us to the final reason why the Big WA future can’t happen. Dealing with global warming necessitates increased fossil fuel prices, and as peak oil cuts in prices will also rise because of this. WA is already suffering from major household energy cost rises (with increasing numbers of households unable to pay: 17,000 households were disconnected for non-payment of bills by Alinta Gas last year), and rising fuel costs will hit hard. This includes personal travel in cars, commercial logistics and air travel. Furthermore, mining and agriculture are major energy users of energy and will be heavily affected as both operational and shipping costs go up.

There are signs that the current WA state government is at last making some plans for the future, notably the Directions 2031 initiative, but there are no signs that they see the energy crunch as a real issue. Not only is Big WA unlikely, if the energy crunch hits an unprepared WA we may well see a considerably smaller WA as people abandon a state in real trouble.