Minister for Natural Resources, Mines and Energy Dr Anthony Lynham has said the North West Minerals Province Blueprint was returning dividends for the local economy, with 600 new jobs coming online and a supercharged geoscience package to target the next big mineral discovery.
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Dr Lynham was in town on Thursday to update Mount Isa Mayor Joyce McCulloch on the latest geoscience initiatives rolled out as part of the government’s $27 million exploration program.
Dr Lynham said there were 600 local jobs in the pipeline in the North West over the coming months, including 360 at the Capricorn Copper Mine and another 240 jobs from the restart of New Century mine.
“I want to see the growth trajectory continue and this is why we are investing in exploration and empowering investors to uncover the ‘next big thing’,” Dr Lynham said.
“We just have to find those new discoveries.”
Dr Lynham said the geoscience package would continue this success.
“Within four years, this investment will bring together exploration geophysical, geochemical and geological datasets and provide it directly to industry to drive exploration,” he said.
Dr Lynham called the north west the “new frontier for the electron future of Australia and the world”.
“We had the carbon era with coal, but now it’s the lithium, the cobalt, the platinum, the palladium and it’s what’s here in the north west that will drive the economy so we have to find it,” he said.
Dr Lynham said the government’s role was to help explorers directly with the $1.3m collaborative drilling initiative with smaller explorers and was also offering a 50 percent reduction in exploration expenditure.
“Aeon Metals, doubled their known copper deposit and cobalt metals at the Walford Creek site near Mount Isa – a tremendous discovery that was a direct outcome of the collaborative exploration initiative,” he said.
The Palaszczuk Government’s North West Minerals Province Blueprint was released in July 2017 to stimulate exploration investment and identify new job-creating projects.
It contains actions to facilitate resource development, diversify the economy and create employment opportunities in areas like tourism.
The geoscience package is among the $30m measures in the Blueprint to support the resources sector, including large-scale geological surveys to identify new commercial deposits, to be completed by the end of this year.
It also includes more international promotion to investors, including an annual investor forum held for the first time in Brisbane late last year and a series of investor meetings and promotion activities in North America over the next two weeks.
Derek Barry
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
