At one stage in recent Australian history there was a drive through out the community to not export primary resources but to do work upon those resources and export them as secondary and tertiary products.
This has all been abandoned to the US driven WTO and the God of Greed.
Where a minority strip mine the planets resources to feed mass consumption and the race to the bottom in labour management.
China but the brakes upon export of irreplaceable primary products to ensure long term access. Shouldn't Australia be doing the same.
To whom do we owe allegiance the WTO and foreign corporations or to future generations of Australians. Shouldn't the focus go back to exporting only secondary and tertiary products to help reduce waste of primary resources, provide skills training and labour opportunities and to ensure long term benefits for future Australians.
This rather than feeding the over bloated greed of a minority who will never be satiated but will consume more and seek to drive down the benefits for Australians workers so that a bloated psychopathic minority can have, more, more, more.

I'd refer you to another economist - Karl Marx.

Now that households have become net savers, the Great Credit Binge deliberately created by post-1982 financial deregulation is causing a Great Deleveraging, which means a shrinking economy and great pain for those deeply in debt. Yet the legacy of the asset-price bubble is high structural costs of housing and services.

To seriously improve our economic performance, government, through government business enterprises, needs to have a presence in the main industries. Telecommunications Commission, OTC, ANL, Commonwealth Bank, CSL, all focussed on being technically good; their flogged-off successors are interested only in making money, but as is all too often the case in such situations, are worse at it (Qantas' and Big Business' poster CEO Alan Joyce, for instance, or Sol and his Three Amigos).

To seriously improve our social performance, recognise first that due to the inequality of the Great Credit Binge middle Australia has run out of coping strategies. Sending two people out into the labour market instead of one, getting more education, delaying fertility, moving in search of a better job, working for longer, living increasingly on debt, and most recently, with no more options, a declining standard of life. Aspirationals, despite their delusions, can no longer bear the costs and responsibilities deliberately offloaded on them by privatisation, deregulation, and austerity.

Eliminating the extortionate greed of the financial middlemen will save far more than the cost of direct provision by government, even allowing for good public-service level wages for the employees. In 2008-09, The Federal Government paid roughly as many billions to subsidise superannuation as it did on the age pension (leaving aside the billions in fee-gouging)!

A 21-hour week with 38-hour pay is entirely feasible, should there be the will. Some economists have recommended doing so to intelligently deal with problems such as unemployment, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, overworking, family care, the general lack of free time. Today's economy is obviously able to provide a good standard of living for all.

We need to return to a more statist/socialist economy in which we recognise that we can no longer afford the greed, corruption, and waste of the profit-seekers. It was the "manna from heaven - 15.5% return p.a." that was a big driver of the whole financial deregulation process; like Macquarie Bank, the fat financiers saw the money to be gouged from the conservative national balance sheets of the 70s.

A first step might be to start processing minerals in Australia, extracting their metal content (value-adding) and exporting only the metal.

1) Decreased volume of exports decreases shipping CO2 emissions
2) Increased value of exports good for terms of trade
3) Increased domestic technology, increased availability of metals for Australian manufacturers.
4) Increased tax base hence decreased burden per taxpayer

Is there an opportunity for this? You bet.

At present, iron and steel are produced in blast furnaces using vast amounts of coking coal (another Australian export) and emitting huge quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere. Turns out, fossil fuel use must CEASE in the next two-three decades if we are to have even a hope of avoiding runaway global warming and sea level rise.

Is there an alternative to making iron and steel in blast furnaces (carbothermic process) ? Why, yes: electrolysis from molten salt bath (600-1000 deg C), similar to how aluminium is won from alumina. In Australia, it can be powered by nuclear power or by solar thermal or whatever (take your pick).

Given that the world is going to be shutting down its blast furnaces over the next two-three decades, this is the time to be starting up this replacement industry.

Professor Menezes, I've made this point to Conversation pieces by Tim Mazzarol (http://theconversation.edu.au/building-a-national-innovation-system-what-can-we-learn-from-korea-9449), Barry Brooks (http://theconversation.edu.au/low-carbon-electricity-must-be-fit-for-service-and-nuclear-power-is-8605), Geoffrey Brooks (http://theconversation.edu.au/treasure-your-metal-why-we-need-to-respect-embedded-energy-6802), and Tina Hunter (http://theconversation.edu.au/china-india-and-australian-gas-who-controls-energy-in-the-asian-century-6243). Perhaps you could all get together and mull over ideas like this?