Rewarding the behaviour of those who do the right thing in mining was one of the major issues emerging from a major industry conference in the north west on Friday.
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The North West Queensland Branch of the AusIMM minerals institute held its third annual conference and dinner in Cloncurry with branch chair Rhonda O’Sullivan saying the theme of the conference was shifting gears “prospering in changing business cycles.”
Ms O’Sullivan said Australia ranked seventh in the world in a global prosperity map and mining was the country’s largest primary industry contributing over eight billion dollars to the country’s gross domestic product despite the challenging conditions and a constantly changing environment.
Keynote speaker Brian Hall, a principal mining engineer with AMC Consulting and former underground manager at Mount Isa Mines, spoke about what mining stakeholders wanted and how miners could deliver it.
“As an industry we are good at getting our costs down and driving efficiencies, that’s doing things right, but the more fundamental thing is are we doing the right things,” Mr Hall said.
“This is a more fundamental question: what are the drivers of value and identifying what maximises the value?”
Mr Hall said the industry needed to reward people who delivered what the stakeholders wanted but he said the problem was that stakeholders, such as shareholders, governments, employees and suppliers often had competing goals.
“But we can deliver multiple goals by building a bigger pie and spreading it around the players,” he said.
Mr Hall said companies often did not spend enough time on mining strategies to deliver those goals.
He said there were three big picture parameters to deal with.
“The things we’ve got, the things we can doing something about, and the things that follow on from those various decisions that we make,” he said. “The key question is what mix of all these big decisions is going to maximise the value.”