Bearing in mind I'm using it as an analogy, it's an appeal to the reality that very rarely did the owner of a generic take away shop complete with its Coke sign and so on make a successful transition. Few if any of those shops took down the sign which said "TAKE AWAY", scraped the tobacco company advertising off the windows and put up a new sign saying "McDonald's" and continued in business.
In reality those who invested heavily in such shops mostly ended up looking for the least bad exit. Reality though was that usually involved some other use of the building, the business itself not being worth overly much for those who failed to see the warning signs and hung around too long.
Milk bars and generic take away shops selling deep fried everything were just one of many possible examples I could have used.
Newsagents today are going down that track. Anyone who can't see that the business model is losing its relevance must be blind. It has the same basic problem - a move away from the core product meanwhile there's more competitors selling everything else.
Then there's things like careers in professional sports or modeling, pop music or even politics. The odd one makes a long term career out of it but for most it's a relatively brief thing even if they do "make it" for a time.
And so on. There's countless examples of the concept but point is we're living in a world where relying on something to last forever, or even just the ~40 years of someone's working life, is a huge gamble and that pace of change is accelerating it's not slowing down.
Now, is anyone going to seriously tell me that selling two basic product lines, that is raw materials for steel production and fuel for power stations, and having over a third of all exports going to one country is a sure thing with no chance of ending?
The writing's already on the wall for both with a greater emphasis on steel recycling and a push to use heat from sources other than coal in production. Meanwhile when it comes to power generation well there's a push against fossil fuels there to the extent of having an international agreement regarding climate change. And those risks are without even mentioning China itself.
The notion that Australia's even slightly concerned about economic retaliation from China is of itself evidence that we've got a problem. When a dependency starts intruding on decision making and you're under pressure to do things you otherwise wouldn't, that's a sure sign it's getting out of hand.
I don't hate China but we're being fools in relying on them to keep increasing their use and imports of coal, gas and iron ore indefinitely. At some point it's going to end and in my view we'd be wise to bear that in mind. That doesn't mean don't sell coal to China just as nobody would sensibly say that someone shouldn't pursue success in sports or music but it does mean having a definite plan for when it ends. A plan that doesn't involve prayers, groveling or ending up broke.