Speaking at the opening of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies Convention in Perth, Marmion backed the resilience of the state’s mineral resources sector, and said government changes in place to stimulate exploration activity would be integral to the industry overcoming its difficulties.
“The EIS and co-funded drilling program are being continued to give some confidence to industry,” Marmion told the media shortly after addressing the conference.
“Obviously we can’t turn around the commodity prices but hopefully this keeps exploration going at a reasonable level until commodity prices bounce up.
“We’ve been a bit lucky with gold with the devaluation of the Australian dollar making that relatively stable over the past couple of years but we haven’t been so lucky with iron ore and some of the other commodities.”
He said he was confident the WA government’s commitment to exploration would get it through the worst of the commodity price downturn.
“I’d be concerned if commodity prices remained low or got lower, but I’m confident given we’ve got two years of the exploration scheme that in two years’ time we’ll be looking at it again,” he said.
Marmion pointed to the Sirius Resources’ Nova nickel project as an example of the positive impact the EIS could have over the industry.
“That’s a direct result of the EIS scheme,” he said.
“I don’t see that as a handout, I see it as an investment in the state’s future.
“We’ve just done a report on the economic benefits of the EIS scheme and that shows that for every $1 million of investment you get over $10 million of direct mining investment and also another 12 and a half jobs.
“If you actually get a mining discovery out of it and get into production from that it actually adds another more than $12 million. You end up near the $1 million returning $23 million, so it’s a really good investment in the future.”
Marmion announced that 44 companies would receive state government exploration support under the 11th round of the co-funding exploration drilling program to be announced today.
Cassini Resources announced this morning it had been successful in securing a grant to drill its Succoth conductor in the West Musgrave region.
