Or, to put that in dollar terms, investment spending in the mining sector in 2006/07 totalled $ billion and rose to a peak of $ billion in 2012/13. The reasons for the huge rise in investment spending in the mining sector have been well documented.
In the case of iron ore and coal, it was a response to the large rise in commodity prices through the 2000s, predominantly driven by the emergence and strong resource-intensive growth of China. Investment spending to increase capacity in the iron ore and coal industries accounts for around 40 per cent of the spending over the past decade (Graph 3).