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Japan's heady growth powered a boom in the 1980s, but trade with China, which dethroned Japan as Australia's top trading partner in 2009, appears headed even higher. The 7.7 percent of GDP it reached in 2011 eclipsed Japan's average of 6.4 percent in the 1980s and even its peak of 7.4 percent in 1985. One quarter of Australian exports are now shipped to China. Mark Beeson, a political scientist at the University of Western Australia, injects a note of caution: Resource booms are often followed by busts. Commodity prices have already come off highs as global mine production catches up with Chinese demand and the global economy has slowed. Some companies have shelved mine expansion plans. But the outlook for investment remains strong, the Australian government says, with about AU$500 billion in projects still in the pipeline. "There're lots of things that could go wrong, of course, but if it carries on, it's going to get more and more important," Beeson says. In some ways, it already is: Turf wars between farmers and miners have triggered a national debate over agricultural land use, a rarity for such a sparsely populated country. In October the government announced plans to create a national register of foreign-owned farmland amid concern that such record-keeping has been piecemeal in the past.
Not since the 1950s, before the modern, free-trade era, has a country done more trade with Australia as a percent of GDP. Then, Australian trade policy gave Great Britain preferential treatment and put the needs of the British Empire ahead of national interests. At the peak of a Korean War wool boom, trade with Britain reached as high as 19.5 percent of GDP, according to Australian government statistics. Though Great Britain and the United States remain far more pervasive influences, China is becoming part of the political and social fabric in Australia, says Chen Jie, a lecturer on international relations at the University of Western Australia. He notes that lawmakers now visit China at the invitation of business interests there, influencing Australian politics. "It's a new phenomenon. It's challenging some of the old assumptions in Australia," he says. Including the price of land in Gunnedah. Paul Smyth almost fell off his harvester and into a crop of sunflowers when a Shenhua representative called him on his cellphone two years ago to offer AU$6 million for his 1,100-acre farm
-- quadruple its market value. Smyth had bought the farm 12 years earlier for around AU$700,000. "You'll have to run that past me again; I'm in a very noisy machine," he recalls saying. "I heard him first up, but I just couldn't believe my ears." He adds: "If I lived two or three lifetimes there, I would never see a farmer come along and want to buy it at that price." Once word got around that he had sold, others who had once greeted him with a friendly "G'day" stopped acknowledging him. "If I was in their shoes, I'd be exactly the same way, I guess," says Smyth, who has retired at 57 and moved to a 3-acre property near the coast. Those who remain are in limbo. Shenhua has completed exploratory drilling after paying New South Wales state AU$300 million for exploration rights, but it won't be able to mine unless it wins state environmental approval for what would be three open-cut pits. With the future uncertain, farmers don't want to invest in improving their farms, and no one wants to buy them. The affected include those who chose not to sell and others who were never given the choice, because they live on the periphery of the actual coal mining zone. "I've got 1,000 hectares of land that's irrigated from underneath," says Andrew Pursehouse, whose farm lies outside the zone but under ridges that Shenhua plans to excavate. "If something happens to that water resource, my land is going to be worth only a third of what it is now." Layton, the Shenhua spokeswoman, says the company may buy more farms in the years ahead if they are affected by dust and noise. The company plans to mine the ridges and leave the soil untouched and plant trees for those it destroys. Smyth misses the Liverpool Plains, but he doesn't believe that farming and mining can coexist. "I think that's just a pie in the sky pretty picture that they paint," he says. "I think it should be left alone. I feel guilty in lots of ways because I was one of the ones that weakened and got out of there."
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