>> This might be about to change as Australia has an election due in the next few week.
Unfortunately, the opposition is also backed by the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union) which includes the Mining & Energy workers.
As such, the opposition isn't likely to take action that threatens the jobs of union members.
The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy, this represents a real challenge for any prospective government.
We've already seen what happened to the Australian dollar when China's northern port of Dalian banned imports of Australian coal and will cap overall coal imports from all sources for 2019 at 12 million tonnes.
Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. An obvious place to start would be to recreate the manufacturing industries that have all but been destroyed[1].
[1] Written as someone with an electronics manufacturing business in Australia.
>The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy.
Not so much. Certainly not in terms of employment or taxes. By and large the profits flow overseas, and once you make this exception, minerals account for only around 8-15% (depending on who you believe) of the economy.. and falling.
And coal is only maybe a quarter of that. About the same as tourism, atually. And mining accounted for only around 3% of employment at the height of the boom (compared with 15%or so for tourism).
You're right on both fronts, the mining companies are automating everything they can and whole political parties were formed to take an axe to the minerals resource rent tax!
However in terms of exports, Minerals/Ores/Gems/Metals accounted for 64.4% of Australia's top 10 exports in 2018. Australia’s top 10 exports accounted about three-quarters (79.5%) of the overall value of its global shipments. [1].
I think you're overstating coal's influence on the Australian economy, bordering on hysteria.
Mining somewhere in the range of $250B of which coal is roughly $50B, in a $1.5T economy. It's obviously significant but "Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy" is patently false.
There's one thing I'm wondering about... I understand that the coal-friendly parties don't want to restrict mining. But what are they saying about export and demand and markets and all that?
Coal has few friends on the buyer side. There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. What are the coal-friendly parties in Australia saying about that?
I'm not sure it has been publicly deabted to shake out who stands where, but probably a classic market-oriented position of "if people will buy it, we'll sell it. If not, we won't". Same as was applied to the manufacturing industry.
Coal is used to make steel. Unless the mettalurgists have come up with something I don't know about that isn't going away any time soon - my understanding is that Queensland coal is mostly metallurgical. Victorian coal is too dodgy to export, so overseas buyers don't matter.
NSW and the Hunter Valley are very exposed to the thermal market. They sink or swim based on how much gets burned in power generation.
Which type: metallurgic (used to make steel) or thermal (for power)?
Metallurgic coal is the more expensive, loved kind (as you need it to make buildings) and that is what Australia produces, at ~40% of total exports by volume (not sure via value). https://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodi... BTW: that is 3X the next biggest metallurgic coal exporter (the USA).
> There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years
Where are you getting that figure from? Coking coal looks pretty solidly in growth from what I know.
1. Coal is used for for generating electricity because it's the cheapest. Its buyers aren't loyal friends, its buyers want the cheapest.
2. The price for new wind/solar plants is dropping quickly, and if that goes on at the same rate as recently, then at some point in the next few years, building new wind/solar plants becomes a cheaper source of electricity than operating existing coal-fired plants.
The price might not go on dropping, but I think there's a real chance it does, and if it does drop far enough and coal's customers actually want the cheapest, then one of the two key markets for coal withers as fast as customers can switch.
EDIT: That ">50%" might be high. I glanced at wikipedia: "About 75% of coal mined in Australia is exported […] and of the balance most is used in electricity generation" and: "Coking coal generated A$22.4 billion of export revenue in 2012/13 financial year with thermal coal bringing in A$16.1 billion". But I mixed up value and volume.
It is hard to know why the current Liberal government is such a coal-friendly party.
My take on this is I think the Liberal party, which once took a centre right position has now been hijacked by the far right wing of the party.
Many of these right wingers don't believe climate change is real and in fact the leader of that right wing faction has been quoted as saying 'climate change is crap'.
> There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years.
Australian coal will be still be selling for many years to come, only because it is generally of a much higher quality than coal from other source.
But it is definitely a dead end industry and the country would be wise to start moving away from coal as a source of income.
I think the implication is that if that is what is going to happen, then that is capitalism solving the ethical problem for them - the government isn't running the mines and the companies will stop once they are no longer profitable.
Australia is a stupidly uncompetitive place to manufacture anything. A friend of mine is managing a (rare!) factory expansion in Sydney right now, and costs of all inputs (rent, labor, etc) are 3-8x what the company is paying in Malaysia.
We in South Africa have the same issue due our location and the dependence on the export of natural resources.
Our third biggest export is motor vehicles and parts mainly from VW/BMW/Mercedes Benz/Toyota but we dodged the Holden/Ford bullet by making cars that could be sold locally and worldwide.
"Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. "
We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to every house and business...
(The joke, for non-Australians, is that we had this, and it was under construction, but then the coal loving conservatives got in power and spent the same 70 billion dollars on installing copper phone line vDSL internet instead, which has actually been a downgrade for many people).
Gigabit is _massive_ overkill, that's the real dirty secret here. That plan was a colossal waste of Australia's resources.
I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me.
The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference.
Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine.
8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better.
56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better)
The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.
One reason for installing fiber is because it's superior infrastructure. It's not simply a gigabit network and gigabit speed is a irrelevant. Fiber will happily transmit hundreds of terrabits per second given the right endpoint hardware. It's install once and reap the benefits for many, many decades.
Another reason is because you don't know what innovations will arise from pervasive fiber connectivity until you have it and there is a ready market for those innovations. Just like mobile phones unlocked all manner of innovations no-one could foresee.
Australia could have been at the forefront of internet connectivity, instead they have a third rate network for billions of dollars spent, all due to political interference.
It would also have made the entire network more or less homogeneous, meaning that you wouldn't need to use different companies and different technologies depending on which street you lived in.
Though I would say that apartment buildings in the metro areas could have just used Fibre to the basement, that would have been fine. Let the building landlords upgrade the connectivity based on demand from the occupants.
Also because a lot of attention had been fixated on the speed of the infrastructure, that let the Liberal party call it overbuilding and unnecessary, and now we have a dog's breakfast of shitty technologies used. Meaning a varied network street by street, house by house, all a mess, and nobody has a clear understanding of what the NBN is meant to be.
Maybe I should have clarified that it was gigabit capable. They weren't offering gigabit speeds to home users yet. Technically it was 2.44Gbit shared between each group of 24 homes.
This is not overkill, it's how the GPON standard based fibre works. Any fibre you're going to install anywhere is going to be gigabit capable. That's what the standard is.
It was not more expensive to put in gigabit fibre than to put in 100Mbit fibre.
Plus, even if it was - why would we install something that is only okay for now, rather than something future proof and rip the whole thing out to replace it later? Why build a country wide network that's only fast enough for five years?
Also, you have no right to claim to speak on behalf of everybody regarding your personal speed requirements.
Gigabit is basically the default capability of fiber to the home. If you're going to basically relay and reinstall your communications infrastructure, it would be dumb to do it with copper.
And Gigabit is certainly not overkill when viewed on a 50-year timeframe, which is realistically how long this infrastructure is(/was) meant to last.
Laying fibre for new networks makes sense. But that's orthogonal to whether to deliver Gigabit and irrelevant to the question of whether to rip out a working network and replace it with "gigabit" as the justification.
"Gigabit will make sense later" is what they were telling people 35 years ago too. Back then they were explaining to people that you'd be able to watch movies at home some day. Yup, you sure can and of course you don't need anywhere close to a Gigabit to do it.
The applications for household Gigabit remain a mirage decades later.
Except, NBNco are in many places finding the existing last-mile copper going into people's homes is too degraded to support FTTN or FTTC (Fibre to the curb)
So... They are ripping out the copper going into people's houses, and replacing it with - Copper. Yeah.
Gigabit is a bit overkill, it doesn't do much that 100 Mbit can't. However the real game changer is low latency 10 Gbit+. That is when the paradigm changes, and you no longer need storage. That is when you can do high resolution, high refresh rate, even stereoscopic video. Where game consoles can play every game. 100 Mbit technology doesn't really scale to that and the difference isn't going to be big enough to warrant a technology change for a long time. So you want gigabit now so you can have something better in the future. Otherwise whatever you have now will be good enough, and so will less than that as well. So you will miss out on the next thing.
Given how it has actually turned out; that is a great argument for wiring up the CBDs in Melbourne and Sydney and finding a nice upgrade path for replacing copper wiring with fiber in a rolling maintenance fashion for everyone else. Not what actually happened, which was sun-setting a perfectly functional copper network in the hope that maybe that would trigger a paradigm shift.
If the aim is to engineer a 'paradigm change', maybe it should have been tested a bit more first. Something like the old charter-city idea. It is a mistake to look to the political sphere to sustain a grand paradigm shift. They change direction every couple of years, and they aren't very technologically inclined right from the get go.
As it was, the NBN rollout looked a lot like a desperate and poorly planned giveaway to the independent electorates where it was first rolled out. Might even have been able to do it in a bipartisan way, although that is a lot to ask for, if not for that. As it happened the NBN was a political stunt on introduction.
There was no perfectly-functional copper network, you are simply making up rubbish. It was not functional then and it is not functional now as part of the NBN. The fact that my internet disconnects every time there is wind or rain and maxes out too slow to watch Netflix is proof.
Careful with all that cynicism, it'll do you a number.
I spent 6 months living in a house with no internet, waiting to get connected to the NBN. The house I rented before that had ADSL and was fine. I couldn't really tell the difference between ADSL and fiber, but the 6 month break from the internet in between does make a comparison hard.
Some people get unlucky and don't have a good copper cable. They aren't normal cases. The copper network was fine. I hope your troubles on rainy evenings isn't too bad, but it isn't proof of anything much. Except maybe that nobody is stupid enough to maintain a cable that is about to be ripped up by the government.
If the parent had said "fiber" rather than gigabit or any specific bandwidth, that would have been a far more bulletproof argument.
The point was primarily the future-proof-ness of the proposed network. Much* of Australia's copper infrastructure is old and dodgy and it was common for technicians to solve water ingress issues with plastic bags and tape.
* I don't know specific numbers, but there's a wealth of amusing anecdotes about rotten copper in Australia's infrastructure.
Where is gigabit available in the UK? I live in Zone 2 in London and best I can get is Virgin's crappy, contended, DOCSIS rubbish. Back home in NZ I could get actual FTTP and it was fantastic.
I had Hyperoptic 1GB/s in Greenwich and was paying special offer of GBP7.5 / month. In regional Australia if pay $80 / month for 35MB/s (maximum line speed).
I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
Yes, fibre to the node uses VDSL, but with ridiculously long copper lengths, meaning only around 1/4 of premises can reach 100Mbps, some get less than 10, many are plagued with dropouts, and it can never be upgraded.
Unfortunately, the opposition is also backed by the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union) which includes the Mining & Energy workers.
As such, the opposition isn't likely to take action that threatens the jobs of union members.
The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy, this represents a real challenge for any prospective government.
We've already seen what happened to the Australian dollar when China's northern port of Dalian banned imports of Australian coal and will cap overall coal imports from all sources for 2019 at 12 million tonnes.
Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. An obvious place to start would be to recreate the manufacturing industries that have all but been destroyed[1].
[1] Written as someone with an electronics manufacturing business in Australia.