Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Grey it gives me great pleasure to talk on anything to do with resources. As I've told this place before—and I don't want to bore people—the electorate of Grey does cover 92.4 per cent of South Australia, an area substantially bigger than New South Wales, and consequently it has at least 92.4 per cent of South Australia's resources. In fact, every major mine in the state sits within my jurisdiction, so I have a great association with that industry.

To pick up the member for Barker's comments, there is some considerable concern in the industry at the moment, particularly about the impact of the safeguard mechanism on the refining and value-adding of our ores here in Australia. We have a few stand-out facilities—and I'll come back to BHP and the Olympic Dam operation in a moment. Production of copperplate, uranium yellowcake, gold and silver happens in what we used to call the MetPlant at Olympic Dam. It has now got a different name. It's a very real and complete operation. Of course, like most of these operations, at this stage it does require at least an amount of carbon emissions to operate, as does the mine.

In Port Pirie we have the Nyrstar smelter. It's now 100 per cent owned by Trafigura. That has been a very good takeover. Nyrstar was in trouble financially and Trafigura was a bigger company that had a substantial interest. You will understand this very well, Mr Deputy Speaker Wilkie, because you have the other half of the equation sitting in your electorate. In fact, it's worth remarking that, until sometime in the late 1980s, the slag, the waste from the facility in your electorate, was dumped at sea. When those tighter restrictions came in something had to be done with that. It found its way to the Port Pirie smelter, where they were allowed to extract enough out of the slag to pay for the processing, and they ended up with a much more benign product. You understand as well as I do that these are interdependent facilities. I welcome the investment that has come to Port Pirie. But to think that the standard regulations do not provide a real challenge now for Nyrstar and Trafigura would be to pull the wool over one's eyes. I'm hoping the government will listen carefully to what they have to say—I know they've been doing some lobbying around the building—and take account of the speed at which they will be able to adapt.

I don't think we have to stretch the imagination to know that things are already tough enough in Australia, to compete in that world market, without having to pay firstly a $75 fine for purchasing carbon credits and then, in the almost certain event that the carbon credit market will be short, being hit with a $275 fine per tonne of carbon emissions. If that occurs I have great concerns for some of these facilities that sit within my electorate, and I think all of Australia would be concerned if it led to offshoring, to exporting our carbon emissions.

In Whyalla we have Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance, in steel manufacturing. I know Mr Gupta; I've met him a lot of times. He is very keen to convert his operations to green steel and has made some announcements in the past, and I think we have some coming in the near future. But to think that this is an easy pathway in the time line of 2030—with an almost five per cent reduction a year, it is going to be very challenging indeed. As with all these investment decisions, we all think the announcement leads to almost immediate construction but of course it doesn't; there will be a million hurdles to get through before that happens, and very few of these projects are able to proceed on time.

To come back to the resources industry in Grey and Roxby Downs: Olympic Dam is a standout. It is the fourth-largest deposit of copper in the world, but, interestingly, it is the largest single deposit of uranium. But the body is substantially copper, so uranium is a by-product. It needs to be extracted and processed here in Australia, otherwise we would not be able to export it; under our regulations on nuclear nonproliferation, we would not be able to export that copper concentrate. So it needs to be extracted here. They also extract gold and silver—a bit over 150,000 ounces of gold a year—so it's not an insubstantial goldmine either. It's an absolute ripper.

There are almost 5,000 people who live in Roxby Downs; it's a jewel in the middle of the desert, if you like. I congratulate BHP for their commitment there. They are also proving up the deposits at a place called Oak Dam, and the story is that it could be a deposit of equal size to Roxby Downs—and there are likely to be more in that part of the Gawler craton. I look forward to that, but once again I need to make the point that we cannot allow obstacles to be put in their path that would not allow for this to go forward.

In the same general area we have OZ Minerals with two wonderful mines—one at Prominent Hill and one at Carrapateena. I visited Carrapateena quite recently. Carrapateena employs around 800 people—a very slick and tidy operation. It is another underground operation just like Roxby Downs. The uranium levels in the ore do not mean they need to process it here in Australia; it is concentrated and exported in that form. At the moment BHP has a takeover bid on the table for Carrapateena; we'll have to wait and see how that goes. OZ Minerals have been a wonderful success, and I congratulate them, as I have done in this place many times, on their Indigenous employment program, which I think as is as good as I have seen in the mining industry.

Out west of Ceduna we have the Jacinth-Ambrose mine, which primarily produces zircon. That is quite a large operation as well—and we see those quad road trains coming into Ceduna 24 hours a day—and exports out of Thevenard. Some 50 kilometres west of Thevenard is a gypsum mine. It's at a place called Kevin. That produces, to my knowledge, about 80 per cent of the material Australia needs to produce gyprock or plasterboard or whatever you want to call it. There are some issues in the coastal shipping act, which is a challenge for them, but, having said that, the gypsum, the Cheetham Salt production platform in the same area, the Jacinth-Ambrosia mine and the grain industry on western Eyre Peninsula actually make Thevenard the biggest port in South Australia. It's a fairly shallow water port, but we are hoping for a deep dredge there to get bigger vessels in in the near future.

I want to move along quickly and cover off on some of the other deposits that sit within Grey and are being mined. The Middleback Range, of course, is the first place that iron ore was mined in Australia. Iron Knob was the birthplace of the iron ore industry and the birthplace of the Australian steel industry. I may be wrong on that last one. I think maybe the eastern seaboard was operating first, but, anyway, we're still mining there and still producing eight to 10 million tonnes a year. The majority of that is for export, but the rest is going directly into the steel plant. It is a very important mine. We also have some very good prospects coming on in the Grey electorate. We have the Great White Kaolin Project. Kaolin is a very fine clay for the manufacture of pots, and that project will have a very good export focus. That will happen up around the Poochera area, or Streaky Bay for those who are not quite so familiar with the topography.

We are looking at underground gasification at Leigh Creek to produce syngas for the production of urea. That might sound like it's a little bit experimental, but I tell you what: if they can land it, it will have an enormous benefit in terms of Australia's emissions, and it will produce an onshore production platform for urea, which, as we know, is one of the sovereign challenges for Australia. Only in the last couple of years we were worried about not having the additive for our fuel trucks, for instance. I could go on. There are many things happening in Grey and more projects in the pipeline. It's a very important area for industry indeed.

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