Give and take: a prosperous Australia for a declining manufacturing industry?

• providing for the transport, health and education infrastructure of the future;

• drought-and disaster-proofing the nation (to the extent it's possible);

• assisting the transition to a 'low-carbon' economy; and

• making substantial and meaningful progress towards eliminating the extent of Indigenous disadvantage.

A sovereign wealth fund would, in effect, convert at least some of the revenue from what is a finite and depleting stock of natural resources into a potentially permanent stream of payments from a stable or even growing stock of financial capital. It would help to prevent a surge in domestic spending at a time when the economy is likely to be operating at 'full employment'.

It would also provide a means by which the present generation of Australians – those of us who, by coincidence rather than as a result of our own efforts, happen to have custodianship of the wealth which has been lying under, or around, this continent for millennia, at a time when the people of the two most populous nations on Earth are willing to pay very high prices in order to procure the resources on which that wealth is based – can discharge the moral responsibility I believe we have to future generations of Australians to leave to them a greater inheritance, rather than expropriating all of it for ourselves.