I would argue Australia suffers from a lite version of the resource curse. There's undue control over politicians and resulting political resistance to invest in things that would diversify economic complexity or go against mining interests. Norway however is a strong counter example.
The key is whether or not a country, it's people and their representatives, are in control of the deal making wrt the resources within their boundaries.
Australia and Canada are, their indigenous people less so, and we can argue about the quality of the many resource deals within Australian and Canadian borders - overall they do less well than Norway.
This is in strong contrast to many African countries, Papua, and elswhere about the globe where often the key parts of government are wholly in the pocket of outside transnational corps who frequently have small divisions of PMC's (private militay contractors) for 'security' and land deals are forced through with near zero compensation to former land holders and NSR (Net Smelter Returns) | leasing returns to the country and people are near non existant.
The reality of what another peer commenter in this thread decsribed as
> But this is a boon to a democratic light in ... Africa
is anything but. eg: US PMC's in Africa .. acting for multiple clients, including China .. but not for Africans.
> Australia and Canada are [in control of the dealmaking wrt resources]
It's not a binary. It's a spectrum. The capability of Australians to control the deal making is diminished by the control that the mining industry has over elected representatives.
Please don't incorrectly paraphrase | strawman my comments.
Your point is implicit within:
> and we can argue about the quality of the many resource deals within Australian and Canadian borders - overall they do less well than Norway.
"The mining industry" should include energy extractors who, IMHO, do more harm to Austrlia than mining - many of the mining operations (not all by any means) are majority Australian owned|controlled with that money staying within Australia (even if with individuals rather than spread out across the entire community).
Even significant energy extractors such as Santos are Australian companies .. it's literally an acronym of South Australia Northern Territory Oil Search, but they're no angels although perhaps arguably better than the non-Australian gas operators.
