Cadia gold mine -- tougher council line on community needs

The Mid-Western Regional Council in Mudgee held an extraordinary meeting last week to discuss a development control plan (DCP) to set down council and community requirements for a temporary mining workers’ village near the town.

A draft of the plan is on public exhibition to attract community comment and input, and Mudgee area residents have until January 13 to make submissions.

There’s no firm proposal for a temporary village in Mudgee at this point, but the US-based construction corporation, the Mac Group, is likely to put up a development application soon to build local accommodation for miners working at the area’s three coal mines.

The Mac Group, with its local headquarters in Perth, specialises in building “high quality villages” for resource industry workers throughout  Australia, and currently has a 242-bed village in Narrabri, a 1,500 room centre at Werris Creek and is planning one at Calliope in Queensland. It says it has a current portfolio of 5,500 rooms under management in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia.

Mac Group not only builds the villages but handles all services, right down to providing and changing the bed linen and, as we’ll see, this in itself represents a vital sticking point in the entire booming mining industry’s relationship with the communities in which it’s working.

On one hand, these temporary villages are seen as virtual vacuum-sealed facilities robbing the local communities of commercial opportunities but nonetheless putting tremendous pressure on local amenities like education, child care and health services.

On the other, they’re symptomatic of a vast industry, said to be bloated with investment and profits, riding a massive global resource boom that will likely continue right through this century – but  needs to do far more financially for the communities in which its mines are located.

MINING INVESTMENT AT RECORD HIGH

At the national level, investment in oil and gas, iron ore and coal mining has reached record levels in the past six months, now topping $232 billion.

According to the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, there are another 300 mining projects getting ready to go ahead which are likely to boost this investment to almost $500 billion.

In stark contrast to this is the amount of mining revenue that goes to the NSW government each year – just $1.2 billion.

The question of whether the industry is doing enough for local communities is beginning to nudge the attention of councils and small businesses in the Central West, and the reaction tends to suggest there’ll be demands for a fairer share of the mining wealth in the near future.

Mayor Des Kennedy

If Des Kennedy, mayor of Mid-Western Council has his way, there’ll be pressure on the state government as well for a fairer share of the mining revenues it gets each year.

“The mining industry contributes $6 a tonne to the state government,” he says. “And it sees it as the government’s job to provide facilities to communities pressed by local mines.

“But of that $1.2 billion, we rural communities want a much fairer share – not a train line from Castle Hill to Central in Sydney.”

Mudgee is one of the first communities in Australia to officially voice its concerns about the affect of mines and mining villages on community resources.

And for good reason. Ulan Road, its main road to the coal mines is under such pressure from mine vehicles that daily traffic movements have spiralled from 400 to more than 3,000.

As with Orange and its Newcrest Cadia gold mine, rents in Mudgee have been pushed up , housing is “stretched to the limit” and child care, pre-school and medical facilities “clogged,” according to mayor Kennedy.

Yet for all that, the mayor doesn’t want a temporary village for miners built in Mudgee – he wants the miners to integrate with the community.

“We want the mining people to live here in Mudgee, becoming part of the community, not confined to their own self-contained village and maybe coming into town to buy petrol or a couple of beers but generally isolated from the town.

“We’re aware that we may have to accept this for maybe four or five years while our housing shortage is remedied, but we still don’t want the sort of separated in-and-out mining community we’re seeing elsewhere.

“We were going all right in the Mudgee region without the mining boom. We have our thriving wine industry and tourism.

“We don’t want mining to destroy our town.”

The same pressure is on in Gulgong, but there the Chamber of Commerce has blamed a lack of development over the years for its own accommodation shortages in the face of the mining influx.

The chamber’s president, Allan McSweyn, has been quoted as saying “If we’d had [Mid-Western Regional Council] put infrastructure in over the last few years, probably the Mac Group wouldn’t even be coming to town.”

In the wake of his comments, the council’s general manager, Warwick Bennett, is now looking for more areas in Gulgong to rezone for housing.

The closed-circuit formula of the mining villages has roused concerns in Blayney, too, which has a temporary accommodation centre on its outskirts.

Kay Jamieson -- "tempt miners from their village"

As David Dixon reports, there are claims that the majority of Blayney businesses are getting few economic benefits from the mining village’s 200 highly-paid Cadia Valley workers.

“Blayney should get a little creative in seeking to profit from the new mining village, local businesswoman Kay Jamieson believes,” he writes.

“Kay says ideas like discount cards for miners and longer trading hours may help to tempt the miners from their fully-catered accommodation. ‘We’ve got to give them a better experience’, the “Well-Fed” coffee shop owner said.

“’The local pubs have been getting most of their custom, but when they go out  there’s nothing open to cater for them’,“Kay said.

Writes David: “Some retailers have expressed disappointment at the lack of business from the influx of miners citing shift-work schedules, the workers’ temporary residential status and full-catering at the village as the main reasons.”

In Orange, which has the world’s second richest gold mine on its doorstep, concerns are likewise being raised about the pressure of the Newcrest Cadia mine on local infrastructure and facilities.

As Orange News Now has reported in the past, the city’s hotels, motels and guest houses are so clogged with resident miners that tourists and other visitors find it extremely difficult to get bookings here. Some have to book accommodation in Bathurst, Wellington or Forbes to attend Orange events.

The lack of visitor accommodation is being seen by some as a crisis for Orange’s tourism industry.

Also, the traffic volume in the city has been boosted so much by mine vehicles that not only are the streets of Orange beginning to look like inner Sydney, but according to mayor John Davis the city now has an official “traffic jam” at 8am and 5pm each day.

“The state government says our population hasn’t increased,” he says, “so I’d like to know who’s driving all those cars.”

John Davis is pleased, as any city mayor would be, with the employment opportunities that the Cadia mine is contributing, also the proceeds of mine workers’ accommodation and other needs – even though the influx is driving rents and house prices through the roof.

Newcrest Cadia is also likely to be contributing to the reported $24 million cost of a proposed expansion of Orange Airport to increase air traffic movements and to cope with bigger passenger jets like the Boeing 737 .

But then it’s the big rise in mining traffic, the daily in-and-out syndrome of shuttling workers between Brisbane, Orange and Western Australia, that’s largely caused the need to upgrade the airport in the first place.

In an on-camera ONN Video interview with Mayor Davis two weeks ago, he signalled that there’ll likely be a firmer city council negotiating line taken with Cadia in the future on its contribution to the Orange community, particularly in major infrastructure and tourism projects that the city needs.

Here’s what he said:

So what does the mining industry say about all this rising community concern?

In a recent visit to Mudgee to draw attention to the industry’s community work, the NSW Minerals Council’s acting CEO, Sue-Ern Tan, made no mention of a need for the industry to contribute more of its massive revenues to community development.

Rather, she said:  “We’re advocating very hard with both the state and federal  governments to make sure that we get a fair share of the $1.2 billion royalties that we pay to the state government back into local regions, to local towns like Mudgee, to make sure the aspirations of that local community get met appropriately.”

All in all a prime bit of industry spin that boils down to this: no additional contribution by our immensely rich, profit-swollen multibillion dollar industry, but we’ll try to get some of the meagre royalties we pay to the state government meted out to help you.

310,000 MINING JOBS IN NSW

To be fair to the council and the industry, it’s estimated that mining “generates about 310,000 direct and indirect jobs in NSW.”

That’s what the Minerals Council states in a glowing account on its website of what the mining industry otherwise means to NSW communities. Here’s what else it says the industry does:

• Contributes more than $2 billion annually in taxes and royalties which is used by the government to provide many essential services

• Is committed to a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050

• Is actively tackling climate change through a $1 billion voluntary national industry fund to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal

• Provides just under 90% of the State’s entire energy needs from coal

• Coal, coke and briquettes are NSW’s biggest merchandise export earner, valued at $8.5 billion in 2009-10

• The total value of minerals and metals exports (including coal) from NSW was valued at $15.3 billion in 2009-10

• NSW accounts for approximately 40% of Australia’s total coal exports

• Asia continued to be the major market destination for NSW coal in 2009-10, at 96% of total NSW coal exports. Japan alone took 52.8% of NSW coal exports

• Domestic consumption of coal (power, steel and other industries) in 2009-10 was 34.3 metric tonnes

• NSW has 42% of Australia’s black coal economic demonstrated reserves

• The value of NSW mineral production for 2009-10 was an estimated $17 billion.