I could do an extended rant on this subject myself but I will spare you from that.To answer your questions -
Is it a good idea? Australia is a quarry and has been so for many years.We have effectively killed our manufacturing industry by indulging in the free trade and globalization abominations.Our pastoral and agricultural industries are in decline because of land degradation and,possibly,climate change.
Without selling off the farm we have no hope of maintaining our standard of living with our current population let alone what is projected if the present insane immigration and welfare policies are continued.So,yes it is a good idea if all we are thinking about is how to keep living the high life for as long as possible.

However,if we take a longer term view,and,I hesitate to mention this factor,a moral view,then it is insane to sell off, willy nilly, resources,particularly energy, which we will need in the not too distant future to assist in the transition to an essentially non growth system where fossil fuels are scarce.

Is there any alternative? We need to start thinking about how Australia is going to survive as an independent nation over the next few decades at least.This is going to require a lot of radical rethinking of our priorities and directions.It is going to require a great deal of change,some of it painful,and sacrifices by everybody.There needs to be openness and honesty by the leadership in order to get the majority behind them.The situation is similar in some respects to WW 2 but then there was an easily identified external aggressor.
The threat now is internal.Some of us have seen the enemy,and he is US.It is we who must change,or perish.

What about the carbon issue? This is a joke,right?
There is currently no intention of doing anything effective about the carbon dioxide we are producing in this country just by burning coal for electricity generation let alone
doing something about what we export,not only to China.

You mentioned the word recession.We are in one and it won't be long before we are in a depression.This is going to cause a lot of suffering and destruction but I think that it is the only hope, a faint one, given the depth of human stupidity,that we can build a new paradigm to replace the old,worn out one - industrial society.
Have a look at history - it has nearly always taken a crisis to effect a change in the way most people think.Sadly,"most people" includes the governing heirarchy in Australia.

Short version:
- No.
- Maybe.
- Yes.

Long version:
- The sale (at 'efficient' speeds ie, as fast as possible) of finite resources in order to make a quick buck is logically at odds with what we should be doing with it, in light of the hard limits of a finite planet. Instead of shipping all the Iron Ore (for example) to China/India/whoever, where it can be make into cheap DVD players and various trinkets, we should be using some portion of it locally to build long-lived (and, at EOL, reusable/recyclable) infrastructure.

- There's an argument I hear often that if we don't sell it now, they'll come and take it later. This has some merit, I suppose, and it's not like we could defend against it if China, the US, India etc decided to make a military play for the vast inhospitibleness of this Continent, so one could view the current mad rush to export our physical endowment in that light. However, if we're going to sell it, why not value-add? Why not build smelters to reduce Iron Ore into steel products, for example. We don't even need to burn coal to reduce the Ore - we can use Electric Arc Furnaces, powered by Renewable electricity. FOr sure, it's more expensive than simply burning 65myo plants, but Iceland and Russia do it, and it seems profitable for them. We could also implement SacredCowTippers Wind-to-Ammonia plants, and export Ammonia as an (CO2-neutral) energy carrier instead of Coal. Or run HVDC cables along the seabed to nearby countries, eliminating at least some of the need for them to build their own power plants (heck, we could lease them the land, have them take the financial risk, and skim some profit off the top).
Or we could export information. Every time someone, anywhere in the world, buys a WiFi card, the CSIRO gets a small stipend. This is because they own the patents on the core 802.1x technology. Why can't we do more of this? As it stands, someone in Australia thinks of a great idea, makes a prototype, and then has to go overseas to get it manufactured, taking the IP with them. Examples include the Black Box Flight Recorder (to the US or Europe), PhotoVoltaics (to China), and Solar Thermal (US/India, see Ausra).

- One can argue that the 'slowing increase' in emissions from Western Countries is simply because we have off-shored our heavy (polluting) industries to places like China and India. Then we bitch and moan about how China is now the worlds leading polluter. If Denmark, a country than can be becalmed by a single weather system ( a high pressure cell passing over the counrty, for example) can justify building enough Wind to provide it with an average 20% of electricity, why can we not justify a buildout of at least as large a scale here in a country which is subject to at least four different wind regiemes, is wide enough so that any substantial change can be seen coming two or three days away and compensated for, and is essentially unpopulated? Anyone holding Native Title also gets a virtually guaranteed income! Heck, overbuild the Wind/Solar Thermal and use the excess to generate Ammonia, which can be stored for later use or exported to earn money! People whine and complain that Renewably-generated electricity is twice as expensive as subsidised, Fossil Fuel generated electricity, but electricity is getting more expensive anyway (there was another CM tabloid story a few months back claiming electricity was set to double in price by 2025, which, at just over 4%, is roughly the RBA's inflation target anyway). It's not like Fossil Fuels will be with us forever, and much of our stationary generation is nearing EOL anyway, and needs to be replaced. Logically we'd replace them with Renewables straight up, instead of more of the same which will become 'stranded assets' in the not too distant future. And that's not even taking into account that other countries might slap tarrifs on anything they import from us (like Obamas plans currently going through Congress). However, I agree with thirra: nothing is going to be done about CO2 and CO2e. It's simply not seen as profitable by Big Coal (who essentially run this country), and it's very easy to run a scare campaign on prices because almost nobody understands Compound Growth, can't grasp that a reduction in energy useage might not materially affect their lifestyle, and are almost wilfully ignorant of the flagrant inefficiencies in the way we currently use energy.