An ICT sector enhanced with ubiquitous high-speed broadband, plus analytics, learning systems and cognitive computing – is becoming the most important utility of this century, according to A Snapshot of Australia’s Digital Future to 2050, which was written by founder and chairman of IBISWorld Phil Ruthven.

By 2050, this new utility is predicted to generate around $1 trillion in revenue for Australia – almost eight times the $131 billion it generates today and could counteract the cost pressure the Australian mining industry is currently facing and reverse a decade-long decline in productivity.

Over the last five years mining has been a laggard in the productivity stakes, with an average 11% decline each year, according to the report.

Mining desperately needs transformation as it is now one of Australia’s most inefficient industries, according to Ruthven.

“One of the interesting things about mining is that we think it’s been growing very very fast but in fact it’s only been growing slightly faster than our GDP,” he told ILN.

“What’s been happening is that prices have jumped four fold or 400% which in a sense has meant that we haven’t had to be as efficient in mining as we would if prices had stayed the same.

“And the interesting thing is that in all of our previous mining booms –there’s been five of them over the last two hundred years – usually price hasn’t gone up, it’s just volumes. In gold rushes, the price of gold stayed still because we were locked in the gold standard.

“This is now a case where the boom has been more in prices than in volumes meaning that we haven’t had to be as efficient which we’re going to have to become over the rest of this decade – and over the next – because competition is going to be tough and prices will probably fall.”

The new ICT utilities could ensure that the industry can remain competitive despite the price fluctuations, Ruthven said.

“In a sense moving to less labour will be one of those things [that uses ICT technology], like driverless trucks and all the rest of it, because it’s worth pointing out that miners are the highest paid workers in the whole of Australia,” he said.

“They average about $112,000 per year against the average wage for the whole of Australia being about 65. So in a sense it’s a very high labour cost industry.

“I think they’re going to meet the challenge but they have been saved so far by massive price increases rather than the need to be efficient.”

Smart sensors and machine to machine communications will reap productivity benefits for mining by taking out labour costs and increasing efficiency, according to the report.

“Superfast broadband will play a very important function in logistics, virtual operations (including robotics), ore grade use optimisation and exploration analyses,” the report states.

“This will become much more important as price rises pause and fall after the current cycle peaks in the 2020s, if not earlier.”

Automation will be essential to compete with South America and African producers, Ruthven said.

“We have the advantage of being closer to where the demand is,” he said.

“We’re closer than South America to where the market is which of course is China and India and still Japan to some extent. That proximity has been a big advantage but we’ll have to more than take advantage of efficiencies to offset the real competition which is going to come from South America.”