Figuring that if Australia has 36%, and South Australia has three quarters of that, then our state must surely, apart from any other reason, be one of the most stragegically important places in the world.

How could any self-professed superpower feel anything but duty-bound to protect such an important asset, especially if it might one day depend on the ore for its survival ?  What an Achilles Heel the place could become if it's defence was left to the natives.

So we get B-2s on bombing simulations from Guam, a run of "joint trining exercises" that will turn parts of the State into simulations of the Persan Gulf and Afghanistan, Christ knows what monitoring the desert from just outside our vertical territory limit of 100km.

In the meantime, while Pine Gap listens to Al Qaeda phone calls and pinpoints co-ordinates for massive bomb strikes on Iraqi houses, Jindalee monitors the sky for incoming missiles with which Australia has nothing to retaliate against (until the defence corporations build the AWDs)  Surely there's never a US Warship too far away, ready to respond to a JORN warning?  If we ever needed one to remain handy, now would be the time.

When I get near these trains of thought (pun intended) my mind keeps going back to the series of books call The Amtrak Wars  Wilipedia sets the worldscape well:

[extract]

The nation is despotic regime ran solely by the inbred First Family; few who are not in the First Family live beyond their thirties due to 'high radiation levels' which were actually created by the Family as a means of controlling the Trackers (as citizens of the Amtrak Federation are called). Access to technology and information is carefully controlled by the Family.

Above ground activity, both transport and defence, are conducted by rail.   If Patrick Tilley was writing the Amtrak books today, he no doubt would have factored in the Bush  Administration,l Halliburton and Australia as a second Amtrak colony, a plan B survival outpost (Asimov proposed such a concept in his classic Foundation series)

[extract]

Seldon foresees the fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting thirty thousand years before a second great empire arises. To shorten the period of barbarism, he decides to create the Foundation, a small secluded haven of technology on the planet Terminus, to preserve knowledge of the physical sciences after the collapse. If done properly, only a thousand years would be required before the next empire is established.

And the knowldege and hub that is being created in Adelaide is twinned where?  Why, The Bush Family's home city of Austin, Texas, of course!  The only thing the place really needed was a port, and now they've got Adelaide and decent high speed realtime data transfer

Given global corporations' favouring of working  from bare earth instead of repairing pre-existing infrastructure, Australia is a much better locale in which to create such an environment, and doing so would create an infastructure for maintaining defence of the huge fuel reserve.  An Asimov-style safety net would be considered handy to the Texans, no doubt.

I wonder how an enemy might look at all of this?  Would it make one think that, given that further implementation of forward planning would eliminate many chances of such,  an attack on Australia might be a "now or never" situation?

Apologies for the rambling.. I'm trying to make sense of things while holding my breath until the September 11 anniversary has come and gone without sounding the Trump that will herald the Neocons' Rapture.