WA's gold miners divided on McGowan's hard border
Some of WA’s biggest gold miners are divided on WA’s hard border policy.
Speaking at the Diggers and Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie on Monday, Gold Road Resources managing director and chief executive Duncan Gibbs said they were juggling with smaller pools of talent as iron ore companies swallowed up workers from other sectors to fill vacancies left by east coast workers who remained in their state.
WA gold company bosses have offered their take on the hard border.Credit:WAtoday
He said their Gruyere gold mine had been mostly unaffected but there were growing reports in the industry it was getting harder to find staff.
“I think you're starting to see iron ore recruiting out of the gold and nickel sector and what have you,” he said.
“On the operational side of things you always have the issue with things like mining engineers. What you're probably seeing more than anything is things like shutdown labour, some of which comes out of the east coast.
“As an example, we had to change the crew that was planned to do that tailings dam mining job for Gruyere.
“It’s not at the stage where you can get the work done but it is a smaller pool that we’re all kind of juggling with at the moment.”
Evolution mining executive director Jake Klein couldn’t attend Diggers and Dealers event in person thanks to the hard border, instead, he delivered his presentation and press conference via video link.
He said Australia had done well throughout the pandemic but the border restrictions were an impediment to business and “the sooner they can be lifted the better.”
The hard border has been wildly popular in WA and has launched Premier Mark McGowan to a level of popularity rarely seen in politics.
Though criticisms are growing over his unrelenting stance on travel bubbles with states that have recorded no community transmission of COVID-19, in some cases for a longer period than Western Australia.
Federal Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has had several digs at Mr McGowan over the borders as well as high profile businessman Richard Goyder.
But parts of the gold sector strongly back the border policy.
Saracen Mineral Holdings managing director Raleigh Finlayson, who hosted Mr McGowan at the Superpit gold mine in Kalgoorlie on Sunday, said he was “happy with it shut.”
“As much as what you say it would be great to get back and talk to shareholders again the flipside is if we open up too soon and start getting cases or, god forbid, we start getting cases in a regional place like Kalgoorlie or one of our mine sites we will very quickly regret it,” he said.
“I get everyone's desire to have to open but I agree with the premier, we can risk having was opened up to cases again and until you see that trend across the states I'm aligned with the premier on that.”
Northern Star Resources executive director Bill Beament said while three of his colleagues had just completed a “shithouse” 14 days of isolation, he backed the borders and said another breakout of the virus would cause far more harm.
Hamish Hastie is WAtoday's business reporter.