5 June 2014
Barry Fitzgerald
The Australian
Mrs Rinehart — Australia’s richest person and the major shareholder in Fairfax Media — said too many people believed that “once you have a tenement granted to you, all you do is sit back and wait as the money pours in from it’’.
Writing in her regular column in the Australian Resources and Investment magazine, released today, Mrs Rinehart said the perception of easy money was “far from the reality of things’’.
Mrs Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, and its Japanese and Korean partners, earlier this year secured a record-breaking $US7.2 billion financing package for the $10bn Roy Hill iron ore project in the Pilbara.
Mrs Rinehart and company chief geologist Richard Paquay first prospected Roy Hill as a virgin exploration tenement in 1992, shortly after her legendary father Lang Hancock had died.
In April, when recounting Roy Hill’s history at a signing ceremony for the financing package, Mrs Rinehart said the 1992 field trip showed the prospect, as it was then, to be different from normal sites in the Pilbara in that it was a very extensive flat plain, with just a few small rises in some places.
“The other major Pilbara deposits were of course massive hills with visible outbreaks of what was clearly iron ore. Yet, the Roy Hill deposit was one that most people could drive through and not even suspect that it was going to ever be what it is now about to be,’’ Mrs Rinehart mused to bankers at the April ceremony.
“We started small, but we had a vision and stayed the course, despite all the significant roadblocks placed in front of us.’’
Mrs Rinehart said the nation needed to be aware of another reality, the need for revenue-providing export industries.
“Australian companies cannot succeed in the world markets where we compete against lower-cost commodities from lower-cost countries,” Mrs Rinehart said. “We need to see costs decrease in Australia in order to remain cost-competitive if we wish to see the goose continue to lay its golden eggs.
“Investment is critical for Australia. Without jealousy-inspiring profits, investments of substance do not follow. The mining industry has a multiplier effect on many related industries, and helps to provide the revenue that our country needs — particularly while in record debt, and in circumstances in which the nation must borrow further to pay its interest bill!”
Courtesy of the Australian