Just saw this news item – “A long wait for new Tanami tenements” – in fact a six year wait.
Of course the legal and quasi-legal “leasing” costs would have been mounting all of that time. Crazy way to run a country, to handicap investors who want to spend their hard earned on mostly low impact activities to add to the National store of knowledge about our mineral resources. Minerals which if mined will help keep this country in a manner it has become used to. In this case the company Northern Minerals NTU has a market capitalization of $64Mn so can stand the cost of a wait like this. Many exploration companies are a tenth the size or less.
It can hardly be in the traditional owners’ interest for it to take six years for the government to approve a lousy exploration licence. For heaven’s sake, this is a few blokes wandering round a desert of 4842 square kilometers, drilling for samples here and there and going away again. Possible result in the long term – high-paying jobs in the district.
Maybe if Abbott gets in he can use his good relations with several real Aboriginal leaders to streamline the Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which seems to be causing most of the delays. Well, that and sheer bureaucratic stuffing around, of course…
There is no trust left any more. The traditional owners have been shafted by the pastoral industry, the bureaucracy, miners and even their own supposed agencies like ALT, IPA and DIA.
The mob on the Tanami Lake Gregory zone have even had their pastoral lease taken from them by WA’s pastoral and lands board and given to someone else because they supposedly failed to remove feral horses by a certain date. They wanted to run cattle but were stymied every step of the way. Fault mainly lies with ALT, DIA and PLB. Meetings which I attended promised much and delivered zilch.
In the Kimberley and Pilbara, few indigenous mobs have faith in Miners or the Bureaucracy. Woodside, Fortescue Metals Group have ignored and changed conditions on development, noted in The Australian on Saturday with good articles (for a change) from Graham Lloyd.
Deceit from Government and Agencies such as EPA, Heritage council, KLC and more.
The WA Government have continued their culture of deceit here, at Yindjibarndi and the Burrup for the past 2 years.
An issue we in Australia have yet to address, because of the mining boom and the Howard government paying down the federal debt, is how to generate economic growth when debt fueled growth is no longer possible, because debt levels are to high?
The best answer is probably reduced regulation, but the usual suspects will be up in arms about that.