Sandiago S. Uno, president of Indonesia’s Saratogo Investama – which has a large part of its portfolio in resource companies – has a simple message: “The commodity super cycle has gone”, he told Japan’s Nikkei news service recently.

The company is planning to sell down much of its commodity exposure and move into the Indonesian consumer sector, its first move being to take a stake in a franchise operation for high-end stores such as Guess and Celine.

In October, Chinese exports of steel rose 42.2% (year on year). This was after an extraordinary 73.2% jump in September. Chinese steelmakers are finding their domestic market saturated and are now pushing metal into Southeast Asia, South Korea and the Middle East. That tells you a great deal about the wilting resilience of China’s domestic economy.

The Saudi oil strategy, which has sent crude prices to five-year lows, may be aimed at kneecapping the North American shale producers but the world economy looks like it’s going to be collateral damage as global confidence is shattering.

Possibly the most alarming news of the week – from the point of view of the Australian mining sector generally and the junior outfits in particular – was the reporting yesterday here on MiningNews.net of the latest research by SNL Metals & Mining which shows that 39 large miners budgeted $US4.3 billion ($A5.2 billion) on exploration in 2014, or 40% of the total $10.7 billion global exploration total. The 25 largest players with gold exploration budgets accounted for 39% of worldwide gold exploration, while copper majors were responsible for just over half of global spend.

So that does not suggest things are going swimmingly in the junior sector, by which we must mean primarily companies in Canada and here. There once was a time when the majors were getting out of exploration and happily leaving the drilling and risk-taking to the juniors. But much of the junior sector may no longer be able to shoulder such a task given the capital squeeze.

You can sense that large swathes of the junior sector are being sidelined. Anecdotally, I was encouraged until lately. When combing through the ASX announcements every day there seemed to be a good weighting of releases announcing drilling beginning or field work starting up. But just in the past few weeks those sorts of announcements have been less and less frequent. There seems to have been a sudden drop-off. Also, I list in my diary any announcements that seem potentially worthy of keeping an eye on. Most weeks, until about two months ago, saw each week’s diary carrying a good many notations. Now the pages are largely unused white space.

But, even in the mining big leagues, Australia is not exactly cutting a swathe. The latest metals outlook from BNP Paribas contains lists of new mines in various base metals.

Zinc is the current analysts’ favourite but not one Australian company figures in new significant projects – and the only new Australian-based panned zinc mine is Chinese-owned (and the two expansions limited are controlled by Glencore).

At least we get one in the 19 important nickel projects – Sirius Resources at Nova – but that is way out past 2016 and there is no Australian presence among the 18 upcoming copper producers.

But there are other challenges that Australia has to get its head around. One is the coal-by-wire concept where the coal, after being extracted, is no longer put on expensive railways and/or bulk carriers, but the electricity is produced at the mine site with the power then fed by cable to where it is needed.

Even Indonesia is ahead of us here. The government in Jakarta is looking to unlock the potential of massive deposits of low-grade lignite in Sumatra. Most of the deposits are in the interior and the quality of the coal would not support high transport costs. So the Indonesians are investigating building mine-mouth power plants and sending the electricity by high voltage transmission lines to other part of Sumatra and also to Java and Bali where demand is high.

Asia is going to move more toward pipelines (for gas) and transmission lines (for exploiting coal on site). Where does that leave Australia and the dependence on LNG carriers and bulk coal shipping?

Underwater power cables linking with the planned Asian grids may be one answer, but is anyone here even asking the question?

If the commodity cycle is in secular bear mode that will last for several years, we had better start thinking outside the circle fairly soon.