Photo by: Bloomberg
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) has urged the state government not to rock the royalty boat, ahead of the state Budget on Tuesday.
QRC CEO Ian Macfarlane said on Monday that the government’s previous commitment to royalty stability was welcome, with the government’s pre-Christmas projections for an extra A$806-million from 2017/18 to 2020/21 in royalty revenue providing additional funding to reinvest in services and infrastructure.
“The industry welcomes the government’s long-term vision for the development of the North West minerals province and developing our rich mineral reserves that will drive the advanced manufacturing boom across the world. Electric vehicles will need almost four times as much copper as those running on petrol. If we have the right policies and the right incentives, Queensland can be in the driver’s seat. If we don’t, we quickly get stuck in the back seat or just left behind.”
Macfarlane said that an important investment is the government’s commitment to the Collaborative Exploration Initiative.
“We urge the government to continue to invest in this area, because it is an investment that industry more than matches and it will help bring on the new mineral discoveries, the new mineral projects and the new mineral jobs,” he said.
The QRC was hoping that the state Budget would double the current A$3.6-million investment in the Collaborative Exploration Initiative, over the four year programme, while also continuing and expanding the role of the Resources Investment Commissioner to ensure that Queensland was capitalizing on the growing global demand for advanced manufacturing materials such as copper, cobalt, rare earths, bauxite and metallurgical coal.
The latest Fraser Institute 'Annual Survey of Mining Companies', released in February, found that while Queensland was third of 92 international jurisdictions for “mineral potential” and fifth for “availability of labour and skills”, Queensland is falling to twelfth for “investment attractiveness” impacted by its sixty-eighth position for “uncertainty about environment regulations”.