Maybe we are moving away from trades and labour toward a suit and tie economy where people talk for their money.
To some extent we certainly are, but all that talking is sending money straight out of the country in most cases.
There's a huge economic difference between making cars (for example) and simply selling them. The former keeps money here, the latter sends it straight offshore in the hope that we can sell enough iron ore and coal to pay the bills. Not that mining has too much of a future - WA's iron ore reserves won't last to the end of this century at current extraction rates and it seems pretty obvious that the future for coal is limited in the long term too.
We're fast heading toward a situation where Sydney and Melbourne are the only places in Australia that are economically sustainable. Tassie has been basically stuffed economically since the 1980's, SA is in trouble now and it's not overly difficult to see that WA and Qld will eventually join that list in another 30 or so years time once the mines end up like Burnie's former factories and disappear one by one, never to be replaced.
If you look at Tasmania in particular, since European settlement the only time it has consistently performed well economically was the period 1916 - late 1970's on the back of heavy manufacturing industry. Prior to that it was agriculture and mining, they had their booms no doubt but overall didn't make the state wealthy. Since then it has become tourism, it creates a lot of jobs but the vast majority are low skill, low wage jobs compared to what's been lost in heavy industry.
Looking back at what's gone over the past 40 years, it's a pretty long list. APPM Burnie, HAL, Papermakers, APPM Wesley Vale, Wander, Tioxide, NW Acid, Southern Aluminium, Coats Paton, Waverly Woolen Mills, Starwood, ACI, ACL, Stanley, APM Port Huon, Electrona, Blundstone. And those are just the "big" ones that come immediately to mind, there's plenty of smaller things or that I've forgotten.
Then there's things that still exist as such but which have radically downsized or moved to being an import operation rather than production. There were two gas production plants, now it all comes from Vic. The Hydro used to have 3000 construction workers but that's all gone now since there's nothing being built. TEMCO, Bell Bay Aluminium, the zinc works and Norske Skog (formerly ANM) are still running but have each shed 1000 - 2500 jobs from their peak. I doubt that anyone seriously expects that all of the "big 4" (which used to the "big 5" until APPM closed) will be here forever.
The state's image may well be of wilderness etc, but economically Tassie was extremely reliant on manufacturing. As the factories have gone one by one, high wage jobs have been replaced with, at best, lower wage service industry jobs.
Much the same applies to SA really.