Remember, too, that the country that was our main export market, Japan, has experienced very subdued economic growth over the past 20 years, and that several other of our Asian trading partners experienced a very severe economic crisis in the 1990s.
I would therefore conclude that our luck has been somewhat mixed, and we need to look to other factors to explain Australia’s good growth performance. I won’t pretend to be able to provide a detailed analysis of these factors in the short time available today, but I do want to highlight a couple of factors I think have been important.