Iron ore will peak at about $160 a tonne this quater but will drop. Working on $150 per tonne and 10000 tonnes per hours (which is not the fastest laod rate) means that an iron ore berth will lose 1.5 million per hour where the berth is not available.
<snip>
I am not defending the miners but a resourse rent tax may work better if you hit compnies onthe basis of thier ownership percentage with those ith significant Australian ownership paying less than the one that are fully foreign owned. At least that would encourage Australian ownership and some of the profit would stay here.
Roll on soveriegn wealth fund....................... bugger I am dreaming again.
I was just pointing out the
cognitive dissonance at work here. Miners complain that the RAN isn't around. Miners use all wharf space available. RAN at fault for not being around.
I think they use similar logic when it comes to mineral ownership, rights and royalties.
Although finding fault with many of the opinions expressed, I loved the documentary
The Corporation for comparing the behaviour of corporations (who have most of the rights of an individual, but none of the social responsibilities of an individual) against a mental illness diagnostic criteria. The conclusion? Corporations are
psychopaths!
To be frank, I'm in two minds as to the worth of the mining industry to the Australian economy. Great for WA, sucks if your economy is based on manufacturing, agriculture, services or anything else that
isn't mining. Everything is great if you work in the mining industry and you can live like a cashed up bogan, meanwhile large areas of the Australian economy not devoted to extracting and exporting large amounts of ore to far flung places are withering. Cashed up mining interests pay a lot in tax, but businesses that are struggling due to the high dollar are paying less taxes (and employ a lot more people than the miners). How long before the Australian economy is as hollow as that of a Gulf state?
Just like politics where a long-term plan goes out to four years and a lifetime is eight years, there is no thought to sustaining a company further than the tenure of a CEO and his/her next bonus via a 5% share price bump.
What happens when mineral reserves start being exhausted and we no longer value-add (Australian processing into metals, manufacturing, etc) and we didn't save any of the income (a sovereign wealth fund)? It wasn't that long ago we were saying Australia had black coal and iron ore reserves to last hundreds of years, now it is 100 and 70 years. Zinc, gold, manganese will last less than that. Diamonds is something like 15 years. Wow, better hope we either find more deposits or demand doesn't keep increasing.
<Sarcasm mode: On>
Accelerating extraction of everything and selling it all
now is a great idea, because it is not as if demand is going to continue growing as China and India develop into post-industrial economies. And as we all learned in Economics 101 when supply diminishes as mineral resources are exhausted the prices of the resources goes down. So we should be selling everything off now as quickly as it can be extracted, shipped and value-added in China.
<Sarcasm mode: Off>
But this is a forum for discussing military matters that are paid for by mining and not the politics of mining, so that is that last I'll bleat on about the matter.
