Regional development, redistribution and the extraction of mineral resources: The Western Australian Goldfields as a resource bank Matthew Tonts * , Kirsten Martinus, Paul Plummer School of Earth and Environment, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia Keywords: Regional development Mineral resources Staples thesis Australia abstract The first decade of the twenty-first century was one of the most prosperous in Australia’s history. The boom was led by a buoyant minerals and energy resource sector, contributing to high levels of economic growth, rising real wages and low unemployment. Yet, as with the nation’s previous resources booms, there were marginal transformations in the economies of those regions from which the minerals were extracted. Overwhelmingly, the wealth generated by the resource boom has concentrated in the cities. Moreover, public expenditure in resource regions also remains comparatively low, and indeed tend to reproduce a development framework oriented towards extraction rather than diversification. This paper employs elements of Innis’ staples thesis to help explain this pattern of regional development, and in particular the relatively low levels of reinvestment in resource peripheries. Drawing on the notion of a ’resource bank’, we contend that resource regions are often viewed as a reserve of latent wealth that can be drawn upon for the benefit of the urban ’core’. Yet, we also highlight emerging strategies aimed at overcoming this and that seek to return a greater proportion of wealth to those regions from which it was extracted. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Natural resources have played a defining role in the evolution of Australia’s economy, contributing substantially to export earnings, gross domestic product, foreign investment and employment. Arguably, at no time has this been more apparent than during the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the nation rode a wave of prosperity largely as a result of the exploitation of sub- stantial natural resource endowments (Cleary, 2011). In the 2011 financial year alone, the combination of mining and energy re- sources contributed 55 per cent of export earnings and 8.4 per cent of gross domestic product (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2012). In Australia’s most resource dependent economy, Western Australia, the economy grew at an average annual rate of 4.5 per cent be- tween 1991 and 2009 (Battellino, 2010), with the major mineral and energy commodities contributing 78 per cent (A$95 billion) of export earnings in 2012 (Department of State Development, 2012). Indeed, Western Australia provides an exemplary case of a resource-led economy. In the 1890s, the discovery of gold helped kick-start the economy and enabled the Colony to escape the eco- nomic depression that affected much of eastern Australia (Crowley, 1960). Moreover, major iron ore projects in the 1960s, nickel and bauxite discoveries in the 1970s, and oil and gas exploitation from the 1980s have created an overall picture of economic prosperity, wealth and abundance (Bolton, 2008). Conceptually, Western Australia appears to fit closely with the staples thesis, which emphasises the development trajectories of peripheral places dependent on the export of raw materials (see Bertram, 1963; Hayter & Barnes, 1990; Walker, 2001; Watkins, 1963). While this body of work points to the potential for rapid growth and industrial diversification to occur around the exploi- tation of export staples, it also stresses that there is nothing auto- matic about these processes (Hayter & Barnes, 2001). Indeed, local abundance can often lock in resource dependence, as opposed to generating diversification, ultimately making such places suscep- tible to boomebust cycles that are ‘cyclonic’ in their speed and devastation (Keeling, 2010; Walker, 2001). Much of the empirical research inspired by staple theory has tended to show that those localities from which resources are extracted are often economi- cally and socially vulnerable, and subordinate to economic and political ‘cores’ (Barnes, Hayter, & Hay, 2001; Bunker, 1989; Gunton, 2003). Many of the challenges elaborated in staple theory are evident in processes of regional development in Western Australia. At a macro-level, the State has tended to avoid the sharp booms and * Corresponding author. E-mail address: Matthew.tonts@uwa.edu.au (M. Tonts). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Applied Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apgeog 0143-6228/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.03.004 Applied Geography 45 (2013) 365e374