There’s nothing like being at the top of the cycle of the minerals and metals markets to highlight the ecstasy and pitfalls of Western Australia’s resources-reliant boom-and-bust economy.
On Thursday, the state government announced its intentions to run an advertising campaign to pinch skilled migrants from other jurisdictions in Australia and New Zealand, while seeking an extra 5000 onshore places through the federal government’s State Nominated Migration Program, to feed the resources beast which kept the country’s economy going through the COVID-19 pandemic.
It did so by selling off its interests in the Tropicana gold mine in WA, which it was shopping around at the last Diggers and Dealers event, and going into a joint venture with Tianqi Lithium Corporation which has a 51 per cent stake in the Greenbushes project – the world’s largest hard-rock lithium mine – and 100 per cent ownership of the Kwinana Lithium Hydroxide Refinery.
IGO also has a nickel-copper-cobalt operation that has been producing since 2017 but will need to find more significant deposits if it wants to keep supplying nickel in the back end of the decade and in the future. Mr Beament was the architect of the $16 billion merger of Northern Star Resources and Saracen Minerals, which runs Kalgoorlie’s iconic gold producing Super Pit, which he only detached himself form earlier this year.
But the under-fire gold miners at this year’s conference were not going to take any imputations lying down in a city built off the commodity. “I want Elon Musk to start tweeting about gold and not Bitcoin and all these other things,” he said, half-jokingly.One Australian-listed gold company, West African Resources Limited, was named the digger of the year for starting a new mine in the land-locked country of Burkina Faso in the middle of a pandemic to build up a $1 billion market capitalisation.
Northern Star Resources recently started a dialogue with the 137 residents of the suburb of Williamstown on a voluntary relocation program, where it could buy up homes and help move residents. No lockdowns have been triggered at the site, which can have as many as 2000 workers at any one time, or elsewhere in WA
“Cutting off a large portion of the workforce in this current environment also doesn’t make sense. So I just think we have to work through this.”