What seems more important is the quality of a nation's institutions, and their ability to ensure that the benefits of the mineral endowment are not squandered through rent-seeking (van der Ploeg 2011). Then, as now, there were concerns that our prosperity might be based on too narrow a foundation.
Even around the turn of this century, I remember foreign investors telling me that Australia was an ‘old economy’. We should stop digging things out of the ground, they said, and start building microchip factories. Of course, this would have meant stopping the export of commodities in order to start the export of different commodities.