Countries with vast reserves of gold, oil, coal and iron ore – to name but a few commodities – have risen to the top of the pecking order.

And with this power has come the opportunity to extract these precious minerals from nations without the means or stability to do so themselves.

Australia is no exception.

The mining booms of the 1990s and 2000s helped off-set the slowdown in jobs-intensive manufacturing that has crippled the economies of many other countries.

But this reliance on finite resources to power the standard of living we have come to expect is unsustainable.

It is no secret that mining companies are having to venture into more sensitive environmentally areas in order to find the resources they need to stay afloat.

To put it bluntly, much of the low-hanging fruit – particularly when it comes to coal – has already been picked.

This means once resource-dependent countries will have to get smarter with the way they go about generating wealth.

And a key to this is telecommunications.

Australia is making a massive investment – some $56 billion at last estimate – in improving its telecommunications infrastructure.

Launched by the Rudd government and inherited by the Coalition under the leadership of first Tony Abbott and now Malcolm Turnbull, the National Broadband Network is a huge nation-building project. Forgetting for a moment that it pales into insignificance when compared to the investment in the mining hugely in recent decades, the question is whether this will be enough to allow Australia to compete on a global stage.

In its present form – even scaled back from the original fibre-to-the-premises to a lesser fibre-to-the-node model – there will be undoubted benefits. There is more to faster internet than just improving an individual’s ability to download pirated television shows and movies to their laptops.

But serious questions remain over whether $56 billion – a large sum no doubt – is a big enough investment to keep Australia competitive for the remainder of the 21^st century.