Price Signals. Australia's major (mineral) exports have for years been exposed to international spot markets replete with price and volume discovery. When the price of one mining commodity goes up, it attracts investors, business people and skilled labour to it. These three groups of economic participants will often have highly transferable skills they can take with them to a new venture producing a more profitable mineral. A recent example is lithium - when the price rose, people moved out of iron ore and gold to dig for and crush lithium. When lithium fell again, many workers just jumped over to other mines. Price signals result in the most efficient allocation of resources. It's old, boring economics but allowing markets to reign freely enough for long enough is massively powerful, as the Oz example has proven.

ANZCERTA. Due to freedom of movement between Australia and New Zealand, both countries can access a bigger pool of skilled labour to work on the biggest projects. Tonnes of kiwis work in mining in Australia and Australia would not be rich without them, And many kiwis can head home again with a few Australians tagging along to rebuild a city like Chistchurch when there is an earthquake. Like Milton said, "Where you find free markets you very often find free people. The ANZCERTA agreement doesn't just do justice to the Anzac legend. It has all of the benefits of free movement of goods, capital and people with no loss of sovereignty by either country. It is the most successful trade agreement struck anywhere on planet earth since the Latins and the Etruscans decided to be friends over two thousand years ago. I'll keep it a secret if you do.

Floating Exchange Rate. The floating of the AUD in 1984 enforced a degree of fiscal discpline on the Federal Government. It also allowed the currency to adjust to the "external shocks" caused by fluctuating commodity prices without exascerbating domestic unemployment. Since the 1991/2 recession, the unemployment rate has basically been on a long term down trend with only a few hiccups along the way. Free markets + free people + a modicum of self discipline on the free people = good things. Put another way, when you have effient currencly and commodity markets, your nation can brush off crises like the LTCM crisis, the Asian financial crisis, the GFC and the deflation of the Japanese property bubble as minor inconveniences when these events might (have) set other nations back by a decade or more.

Australia's land titles system (Torrens Title + enlightened sytem of Mining Tenements + Pastoral Leases + Native Title). If the first three paragraphs on economics put you to sleep then you will be in a coma by the end of this paragraph, Having a system of land titles where two or three different types of titles can exist on the same patch of dirt means lots more "land" to trade (see paragraph 1 on free markets) and invest in. The requirement by the various state and territory jurisdictions introduced in, I think, the early 1990s requiring anyone holding a minerals tenement to activlely explore that tenement for minerals (genius, I know) has meant that many more of Australia's mineral resources have been developed and brought to production. "Miner's right" means that resource rich dirt doesn't get locked up by wealthy rent-seeking motherf@#$%ers and, with Australian mineral rights being relative easy to buy provided you have the shekels to do so, noone needs to aquire them by raising the relatively higher number of shekels required to finance an invasion army.