Quote:
Originally Posted by Dispel
I meant it comes down to geography in the competition between the countries discussed above - US, India, China. Also read my last post - it explains what I mean by the importance of geography, which should make Australia's imperfect position clear.
Taking what I explained into account, Australia's geography has the following drawbacks - its far away from the world's economic hot spots. Its ports are further away still. It is also mostly desert, so travel (and thus trade) internally is restricted. Only the coastal areas can support large populations and are good for agriculture. Technically it may as well be a series of islands, not one big one (plus Tasmania etc). It does have security though. Its resources are decent for its size and its population, but thats actually its main drawback - a population of 20 million can barely swing it on the world stage. Its economy can only grow so large and its military power can never be significant with a population that size. Power is a combination of the economic, political and military.
If it had the population of say Japan, with the same per capita income (distributed as evenly among the vast majority) it would be far far more powerful.
But yes, Australia is one of the few countries I consider to have a reasonably bright future for decades to come. Island nations especially with big homogenous and internally stable populations always have that advantage - like Japan and the UK. Living on an island also creates a confidant culture and islands are so much harder to invade. Again, consider the terminally paranoid Russians at the opposite end of the scale.
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Don't forget that if we
really wanted to, we could be the dominant nuclear power, as Australia has over 60% of all known fissile material reserves, and could basically say we're starting a nuclear program and not let any one have any of our shit.
It's a good thing that our country was founded and run by bureaucrats that just wanted to sit back and take it easy, and that we prefer being relatively peaceful on a national level, because we don't have issues about our gigantic penises that are large enough for their own cork hats.
Seriously though, it does come down entirely to the fact that whilst Australia is huge and has plenty of resources, we have SFA in terms of arable land, and lose more of it annually. But if globalized trade and travel did suddenly break down, we'd probably be ok as we have still have a local manufacturing base for a lot of essentials and even some of the more advanced electronics.