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Perth. As cranes swing across Perth’s skyline, busily erecting towers of steel and glass, Australia’s most isolated state capital is reinventing itself as the gleaming face of a mining boom.

Static for a generation, new high-rises are now rapidly appearing across the city, while the streets have had a cosmopolitan injection of hip shops, bars and restaurants, all built on rampant Asian demand for iron ore.

“Perth hasn’t seen this level of development for more than 20 years,” said Damian Stone, of Western Australia Property Council.

“It’s dramatic, and reflects how the dynamic of the city itself has grown — we are now a world-class city and that has given us, for the first time in a long time, the confidence that we must play a decisive role in shaping our nation’s future,” he said.

It is a fact that has not been lost on Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard or her conservative opponent Tony Abbott who have both campaigned in Perth, on Australia’s far-flung western coast, ahead of knife-edge Aug. 21 elections.

Mining, a key driver of Australia’s growth, looms large over politics and indirectly prompted Gillard’s axing of leader Kevin Rudd in a June party coup, as a row over a new resources tax sapped his approval ratings.

Perth’s Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi believes the city’s transformation, sparked by major resources companies massively expanding their presence in the city, had seen two decades of growth take place within four years.

“Perth is now a significant city globally,” she said.

It is also, more than ever, a mining city. At the peak of the boom in 2007 — an unprecedented period of prosperity when the average wage hit 75,000 Australian dollars ($69,000) — 70 percent of all leases in the city were related to the mining sector.

Today, 20 percent of office space is leased by four companies: mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, and oil and gas producers Chevron and Woodside Petroleum, all major players in the vast state’s resources industry.

The jewel in the crown is BHP’s new 46-story center for its Australian operations, under construction in the middle of Perth’s business district.

The world’s largest iron ore miner will occupy 60,000 square meters of the tower, which is set to become Perth’s tallest building at 249 meters, when it is completed in 2012.

While BHP’s City Square is still being built, the confidence it inspired has already manifested itself in several major commercial and retail developments which have drawn in luxury outlets absent from central Perth.

There has also been an explosion of bars and classy eateries in the past two years.

Chef Wayne Willsher opened up Oliver’s restaurant in the Northbridge entertainment precinct in 2008, little more than a year after flying in from Essex, England.

“I came here for the lifestyle, it wasn’t anything to do with business,” he said. “But there was a gap in the market for good restaurants with above average standards in Perth, which is probably why we’re succeeding.”

It is not just Perth. The boom’s flow-on impact has touched every business in every corner of the state, Retail Traders’ Association executive director Wayne Spencer said.

“West Australians are very conscious of the fact that the mining industry’s driving the state at the moment,” he said. “No matter what your job is, it’s affected in some way by the mining industry.”

As Western Australia gears up for an intensification of the boom, built on Asian investment in iron ore and the massive offshore Gorgon gas project, there are fear’s Perth’s evolution will seize up unless the national government takes its growth needs seriously.

Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief economist John Nicolau said skills would be sucked north to the mining centers, creating labor shortfalls and crippling growth throughout the rest of the sparsely populated state, which accounts for about one-third of Australia’s landmass.

“Essential services sectors like retail, hospitality, health, education will struggle to find people. You’re going to see retail outlets closing their doors, aged care facilities cutting back their services,” he said.

Western Australia’s population increased by 400,000 people in the past decade — up to about 2.27 million people — but continuing to attract immigrants to the state will be a key part of filling the labor gap.

Nicolau said any attempt to limit immigration — seen as a vote winner in less wealthy Australian states with higher unemployment — would be “seriously detrimental” to the state’s future.

“In the last decade, Western Australia’s share of national exports increased to 45 percent. Western Australia is the economic epicenter of Australia, and it’s time for the decision-makers in Canberra to recognize that.”
 

Agence France-Presse