The report, Sharing the Benefits: enhancing Australia’s global leadership in the mining value chain by the Centre for Exploration Targeting, found that the Australian government largely missed the shift from the mining sector being primarily domestic in focus to becoming a global industry.

The report’s authors, Ian Satchwell of The University of Western Australia and Jim Redden of The University of Adelaide, attribute Australia’s global mining success to the world-class skills and technologies deployed by its explorers and miners, which have unearthed trillions of dollars of in-ground value in all of the globe’s resource rich regions.

“This raises the question of what’s needed to realise the latent value of Australian-discovered resources for the benefit of both host nations and company shareholders,” Redden said.

“There’s a strong case for the Australian government to work more closely with industry in deploying economic diplomacy and aid for trade to unlock this huge economic potential.”

The report found that compared with Canada, the Australian government’s monitoring of Australian mining investment overseas was inadequate and that as a consequence Australia’s economic diplomacy strategy was not well aligned with all of Australia’s global mining investment and trade interests.

“Australia needs to change its approach to collecting trade and investment data so as to better track what Australian companies are doing around the world,” Satchwell said.

“If we are not properly measuring Australia’s global economic interests, we can’t properly manage them.”

The report recommended an increase in well-targeted overseas aid to provide support to resource-rich developing nations.

It also made recommendations to the federal and state governments, as well as industry, to enhance the reputation and investment status of the Australian mining sector.

The report is available at here.