Much of Australia has been reduced to desert, patrolled by largely automated mining rigs exploiting the country's rich reserves of mineral ores. Vast solar panel and solar updraft arrays scattered throughout this desert provide energy for the dense cities that cling to life around desalination plants along the eastern coast. The majority of the union's population instead occupies New Zealand, an island nation that, like the UK and Japan, remained relatively unscathed (rainfall has increased in all three regions) by climate change. The union of the two was more-or-less inevitable – the states have a long history of shared interests. They continue to occupy an odd position in world affairs, culturally Western (although increasingly influenced by huge population influxes from the island natio