Stage One: The Resource Sovereignty Referendum (1974)

The first act of a competently governed Australia would have been a referendum in 1974, put plainly to the people in language John from two doors down could read over his morning tea:

“Should Australia’s mineral, energy, and agricultural resources be majority owned and managed for the permanent benefit of Australian citizens?”

The answer, put to an informed public, would almost certainly have been yes. FFS, the question did not even have to be PUT, it SHOULD HAVE BEEN A GIVEN.

The constitutional amendment would have established three things:

• A minimum 51% Australian government equity stake in all resource extraction operations
• A sovereign wealth fund, seeded by resource royalties, modelled on what Norway was quietly building at exactly the same moment
• A permanent ban on the sale of freehold agricultural land or water rights to foreign sovereign entities

Norway found North Sea oil in 1969. By sensible stewardship it built a sovereign wealth fund that today exceeds 1.7 trillion US dollars for a population of five million people. Australia, with roughly five times the resource base and four times the population, did the arithmetic differently. It got considerably less.

A 1974 referendum locking in resource sovereignty would have changed every calculation that followed.

Stage Two: The Refining and Manufacturing Mandate (1975-1985)

A competent government in this period would have recognised one elementary truth: you do not export raw dirt and import finished products. That is not a trade strategy. That is serfdom with paperwork.

Australia’s iron ore goes out. Steel comes back in. Australia’s bauxite goes out. Aluminium products come back in. Australia’s crude goes out. Refined fuel comes back in, at a premium, from Singapore.

The counterfactual is simple. Keep the eight refineries. Build more. Mandate that a legislated percentage of each raw resource be processed domestically before export. The jobs, the skills base, the energy security, and the downstream value would have stayed here.

A modest domestic processing mandate applied consistently from 1975 would have meant:

• Fuel self-sufficiency, or near to it, maintained through to today
• A domestic steel and aluminium industry of genuine scale
• A skills and engineering workforce that compounded over generations
• Regional towns built around processing, not just extraction, with the stability that brings

This required no great genius. It required only that the people making decisions were working for Australia rather than for the companies writing the larger cheques.

Stage Three: The Agricultural Sovereignty Referendum (1992)

By the early 1990s, foreign acquisition of Australian farmland and water entitlements was accelerating. A second referendum, timed to coincide with the 1992 republic debate that was already in public conversation, would have put a harder question alongside it:

“Should Australian agricultural land, water licences, and food production infrastructure be restricted to Australian ownership in perpetuity?”

This is not protectionism in any pejorative sense. It is the position held, quietly and firmly, by virtually every country on earth that can feed itself. New Zealand tightened its foreign land ownership rules. Canada has province-level restrictions. The United States restricts foreign ownership near military installations and is tightening agricultural restrictions now, fifty years late.

An Australia that passed this referendum in 1992 would today have:

• Domestic food prices anchored to domestic production costs, not global commodity speculation
• A farming sector owned by Australians, employing Australians, and paying taxes in Australia
• Water as a national asset managed for food security, not a commodity traded on a market to the highest foreign bidder
• Farmers who could afford diesel, because the fuel was refined here and the supply chain was ours

Stage Four: The Sovereign Wealth Fund (Ongoing from 1974)

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global is the standard reference because it is the most honest rebuke to Australian resource policy imaginable. Same era. Smaller resource base. Vastly better outcome.

Had Australia established an equivalent fund in 1974 at comparable contribution rates from resource royalties, conservative modelling suggests it would today hold somewhere between three and six trillion Australian dollars, for a population of 26 million people.

That is not a number for economists. That is:

• Free university education, permanently funded
• A public hospital system without a waiting list
• Subsidised housing that made ownership accessible to ordinary Australians
• An aged care system that did not require a royal commission to expose its failures
• Infrastructure, roads, rail, ports, and water built and owned by the public
• A defence force equipped without foreign debt

John from two doors down did not need a PhD to see this. He needed only to be asked, and to have leaders who were answering to him rather than to the board of a multinational.

Stage Five: Energy Independence (1980s-2000s)

Australia has more uranium than any other country on earth. It has sun, wind, tide, and geothermal resources of extraordinary scale. It has the engineering capacity, when it chooses to apply it, to build and maintain complex infrastructure.

A competent government threading through the 1980s and 1990s would have made two decisions that compounded into energy independence:

First, it would have kept and expanded domestic refining so that liquid fuels remained a domestic product. The Geelong refinery would not be one of two survivors on life support. It would be one of eight operating at capacity.

Second, it would have invested sovereign wealth fund returns into a diversified domestic energy grid two decades before climate politics made it fashionable, not for ideological reasons but for the oldest reason in statecraft: a country that controls its own energy controls its own destiny.

Australia today would not be rationing diesel. It would be exporting it.

What This Would Have Looked Like in Practice

By 2026, in this reimagined Australia:

• Fuel stocks would sit at 90 days minimum, as IEA standards require, not 30
• Farmers would be drawing on domestically refined diesel from Australian-owned supply chains
• The sovereign wealth fund would be distributing a modest annual dividend to every Australian citizen, as Alaska does from its Permanent Fund
• University graduates would enter the workforce without debt
• Regional Australia would be industrially diverse, not dependent on a single mine or single crop
• Australia’s two coastlines would anchor a domestic shipping industry of genuine strategic depth
• The nation would be a price-setter in lithium, uranium, and rare earths, not a price-taker

None of this required a visionary. It required only that successive governments asked the most basic question of public stewardship: whose interests are we actually here to serve?

The Honest Coda

The resources did not disappear. The sun still rises over the same continent. The iron ore is still there. The uranium is still there. The agricultural land, though foreign-owned in significant portions, still produces food of world-class quality.

The question for the Australia that actually exists in 2026 is whether the next fifty years are managed with the same casual indifference as the last fifty, or whether the country finally decides to hand the administration over to John from two doors down, he could have done a much better job.

The people have been patient long enough.

Enough is enough.

Last Updated 5 months ago

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