Roy Hill is back with more excuses. From The Australian:
GINA Rinehart’s bid to build a $9.5 billion iron ore project in Western Australia is being jeopardised by the Rudd government’s failure to grant her approval to import up to 1700 foreign workers in the face of a union backlash.
The billionaire has been lobbying the government for the past 15 months to finalise a labour agreement as “surety” for nervous lenders concerned her planned Roy Hill project will be unable to source thousands of workers it needs in Australia.
…Then immigration minister Chris Bowen announced in May last year that the government had reached an in-principle deal with Roy Hill that he said would be finalised “shortly”.
Mr Bowen’s announcement sparked a backlash from unions and some Labor MPs, who questioned why the government would allow Mrs Rinehart – Australia’s richest person with a fortune of more than $20 billion – to bring in foreign workers under an EMA.
The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union has spent $1 million during the election campaign on national advertising that portrays the Coalition as supporting policies that favour overseas workers at the expense of locals.
I can’t tell you whether or not there is any truth in the backlash of problems with the EMA. What I can tell you is that labour supply is only one potential challenge for the project, the major one being this, the existing forecast for iron ore supply:
This assumes Rio Tinto’s Pilbara 360 project goes ahead. The cost base for Roy Hill is not publicly available so it’s difficult to judge its real prospects but given the above but it’ll need to be cheap. It is forecast to produce from 2015.
