A road train at Atlas Iron's Pardoo mine, northwest Australia (Photo: Reuters)
And yet the proposed changes to alcohol licensing, in this languid, sunburned township, near the beautiful Kimberley coast, are just one consequence of a stunning global change. A change which affects us all, and which was confirmed yesterday, in a startling report from the World Bank.
To explain. Yesterday afternoon, even as the World Bank was issuing its research, I was standing on the shadeless highway between Kununurra and the even dustier port of Wyndham. For an hour I watched, in amazement, as the “road-trains” thundered along. Each of these road trains was ferrying 120 tons of ore: from the vast iron mines of the Ridges Project, to the waiting barges parked in the Cambridge Gulf. The Kimberley road-trains pass every 20 minutes – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
It sounds like a profitable business – and it is. Miners in these parts can easily earn six figures. In the most solitary locations, to attract employees, they have to pay a doctor’s salary to the guy who turns the Stop sign at temporary roadworks. Some Aussie miners commute to the Kimberley pits from their villas in Bali.
But if the miners, engineers and sign-turners are making great money, so are the people that own the title deeds to these desolate red lands, seamed with metals. And in northwest Australia, that means Aboriginal tribes.
This is where liquor laws enter the frame. Native Australians have long had a troubled relationship with “grog”. This has led many Australian towns and cities, especially in the north, to introduce austere licensing laws, to reduce consumption. And in the past, this legislation worked, because Aborigines couldn’t afford to travel far, to dodge local restrictions.
But now - so locals say – the Australian mining boom means some land-owning Aborigines have lots of money. And these mineral rich Aussies can, it is further rumoured, afford to take thousand-dollar cab rides from Halls Creek, where you can’t buy booze stronger than 2.7 per cent, all the way to Kununurra, where you can buy any grog from lunchtime. To combat these millionaire taxi-hailing dipsos, Kununurra is, therefore, thinking of restricting takeaway liquor sales.
So how do global geopolitics fit in to all of this? To get the answer, you need to follow that iron ore, and see where it goes (and, hence, where the money to cover $1000 taxi-fares is coming from). And that iron has just one destination: China. The speeding Chinese economy is sucking in the majority of Australia’s bountiful commodities, making Australia and Australians exceedingly rich, even the Aussies who just guzzle Victoria Bitter under the boabs.
But the Chinese boom is also making China rich, a fact which was confirmed in yesterday’s World Bank report into global economics, which has one stark conclusion: China will overtake America this year, in economic size (calculating GDP on a PPP basis). That is to say: within the next twelve months, China will become the most powerful country on earth, as power derives from economic strength.
This evolution is epochal. The last time one nation surpassed another as the foremost economic power was when the Americans supplanted the Brits in the 1870s. For two centuries we have only known a world dominated by English-speaking nations. But the British Empire is long gone, the American Century expired in Iraq, and the Chinese will soon be in charge. And this tremendous change will affect us in ways we cannot begin to predict. If you doubt my word, just ask the liquor-store owners, of the imperious Kimberley coast, in far northwest Australia.
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