In a press conference today Treasurer Wayne Swan (correctly) made it clear the resources boom isn’t over:

Can I just make a couple of points about the Olympic Dam project. Australia has an investment pipeline in resources of half a trillion dollars, half a trillion dollars. It’s a very long pipeline and in that pipeline there was no accounting for Olympic Dam. Olympic Dam was a project with a long-life which the company was looking at for the long-term…

…The most important thing that Australians need to understand and know is that the advanced pipeline of projects in resources is at the level of $270 billion. That is going to continue for a long time to come. That pipeline will be there creating wealth and in the future creating exports for Australia and we will see an export boom that will follow this investment boom. It’s sad that one project has not gone ahead because of those international circumstances but we shouldn’t ignore that fact that many projects are currently being bought and will produce a stream of income for our country for a long time to come.

So while we might be getting paid less for the resources we sell overseas, we’ll be exporting so much in volume terms that royalties and resource rent tax revenues should be healthy. The RBA Governor said pretty much the same thing this morning when he appeared before the House Economics Committee.