What’s on the minds of the mines: Bowen Basin Mining Club holds fourth annual resources industry meeting in Rockhampton

Queensland Resources Council Chief Executive Ian Macfarlane spoke in Rockhampton about the resources industry, skills shortages, vaccinations, and the recent death of a worker in a mine collapse.

Senator Matt Canavan and Queensland Resources Council Chief Executive Ian Macfarlane at the Bowen Basin Mining Club lunch in Rockhampton.

Capricornia was labelled a “land of opportunity” and the “powerhouse of the nation” when resources industry leaders gathered in Rockhampton on Thursday.

Hundreds grouped at the Rockhampton Leagues Club for the fourth annual Bowen Basin Mining Club lunch where industry supporters discussed the longevity of the resources industry in regional Queensland.

Queensland Resources Council Chief Executive Ian Macfarlane spoke positively of industry expansion in the Bowen and Galilee basins, backed financially by government and questioned by environmentalists.

“Gas is in very strong demand at the moment,” he said.

“If you look at Europe, the prices are literally five times what they were this time last year, and Europe is staring down a gas shortage.

“So for Queensland that produces a wide range of energy and minerals, this is a great time for the industry.”

He said that at the moment, there was a large skill shortage and more than 1300 job vacancies in the resources sector.

“This industry has got a long way to run,” Mr Macfarlane said.

“We are transitioning to lower emissions, but that just creates more demand in things like rare earths and copper, cobalt, and some of the minerals that we’ve been producing for a long time will also get a lift out of that.”

Bowen Basin Mining Club director Jodie Currie repeated that sentiment.

“Our industry is going to be here for a very long time, and whether it be in critical minerals, I still believe we’ve got decades of coal to go, both thermal and metallurgical, so there’s a lot of growth potential,” she said.

“We’ve got skills shortages, we’ve got an amazing amount of pipeline and projects that are still wanting to get up and going.”

Mr Macfarlane also encouraged resources industry workers to get vaccinated for COVID-19 so that workers were not hampered in getting to work.

He said regional Queensland was showing “a disturbing lack of commitment to getting vaccinated” and “needs to get on the train and get vaccinated”.

“The resource industry has done an amazing job in the last 18 months keeping COVID out of the regions, but we need to make sure that all the companies are encouraging their workers to be vaccinated,” Mr Macfarlane said.

“We’re not very far away from the time when it may not be possible to travel if you haven’t been vaccinated, and that will affect our FIFO workforce.

“If we go into a lockdown situation, people may not be given exemptions to go to their work if they’re from a hotspot and they haven’t been vaccinated.

“We need to play our role in keeping Queensland safe.”

About the death of miner Graham Dawson at the Crinum underground mine near Emerald last week, Mr Macfarlane said the industry would “continue to try harder to do more” to prevent such tragedies.

“Sending everyone home at the end of each day is the mining industry’s first priority,” he said.

“We did fail: it was a tragedy. The industry must learn from the mistakes that have been made not only with this death, but also in other investigations that are going on at the moment.

The decision to restart work after less than a week at the nearby open cut mine was one “for the company”, he said.

“It was a separate mine,” Mr Macfarlane said.

“The underground mine was closed; it is still closed to my understanding.

“Those are decisions that are made by the government and by the company involved.”

Senator Matt Canavan called Capricornia a “land of opportunity”.

“There’s a whole lot of people around there who shoot their mouth off about the coal industry, but I always believe you should listen to the people who put their money in their mouth, and the people putting their money in their mouth at the moment are all the customers in Asia paying record prices for coal, record prices for gas.

“They obviously want this high-quality product, and they’re going to want it for decades to come because there are still a lot of people in Asia without electricity who want to grow their industry, and we’ve got the resources to do that.”

Member for Capricornia Michelle Landry said the region was the “powerhouse of the nation” thanks to the resources industry’s revenue, provision of jobs, and support for businesses.