JH: Can you say more on Investor Rights. For instance, Australia owns the second largest lithium supplier in the world. This just in time for the EV revolution. China would love that opportunity. But I've read recently that the US has just offered to "buy out" a major supplier in Perth. Could Australia get caught up on a slippery banana and fall prey to foreign predators, like Chile did?
CF: On lithium and other critical minerals: in 2013, Geoscience Australia conducted a study of 'Critical commodities for a high-tech world'. It found that Australia was rich in antimony, beryllium, bismuth, chromium, cobalt, copper, graphite, helium, indium, lithium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, niobium, platinum-group elements, rare-earth elements, tantalum, thorium, tin, titanium, tungsten and zirconium. We could establish a nationally owned company that exercised ownership and control of strategically important minerals. We would then be in a position to increase domestic innovation and support higher value-added sectors, such as high-technology research and development, advanced manufacturing, and energy efficiency.
Instead, Australia has established a Critical Minerals Facilitation Office, which involves creating a benign environment for private investors to carve up our critical minerals. The business press reports approvingly that 'the Aussies come to Europe's rare-earth rescue" When the EU goes looking for supplier countries' for critical minerals to feed its manufacturing, 'several sets of ears around the world prick up at this, but few as eagerly as those in Canberra'. (Alan Beattie, 'The EU Plan to Live in a Raw Materials World', Financial Times, 26 November 2020.)
You could say the same thing about Australia's Defence and Foreign Affairs officials.
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This article first appeared in Counterpunch magazine.
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