Rinehart anxious over Roy Hill

 Gina Rinehart is fretting about finding the 8000 construction workers needed  to build the Roy Hill iron ore project in the Pilbara.

Gina Rinehart

AUSTRALIA'S richest person Gina Rinehart is fretting about finding the 8000 construction workers that her Hancock Prospecting needs to build the Roy Hill iron ore project in the Pilbara.

Mrs Rinehart, in her regular column in Australian Resources and Investment magazine, released today, said that it would be necessary to "source some overseas workers so that the construction phase is not interrupted".

The offset would be that once the project was completed, there would be more than 1000 permanent jobs for at least 20 years, all of which are expected to go to Australians. Mrs Rinehart also proposed to set up "training places" for Australians to "gain the skills required for future participation".

"Not all of these will be generated on the Roy Hill project construction sites; they will also be provided in other Australian towns and areas to enable the benefits to be shared," Mrs Rinehart wrote.

"Before we can get to the long-term phase, the project needs sufficient workers in the Pilbara to be able to build and deliver this project," Mrs Rinehart said.

Hancock Prospecting and its newly cemented Korean and Japanese partners plan to secure debt financing for the proposed $9 billion-plus Roy Hill development in time for first production in 2014. The entry of the partners has reduced Hancock Prospecting to 70 per cent of the project, a potential producer of 55 million tonnes a year.

Despite the proposed scale of Roy Hill -- it would match current production by fellow billionaire Andrew Forrest in the Pilbara through his Fortescue Metals -- Mrs Rinehart said that she was "very conscious of the fact that our project is just a small issue in the context of where Australia is, and where it is currently heading".

She frets that the nation is squandering the benefits of the resource boom and is installing policies that burden business.

"Australia is due, for the first time ever, to hit its debt ceiling and breach its loans, if the Australian debt then continues to increase, despite five or six years of the commodities boom resulting in increased revenues. We should be preparing for this and doing whatever we can to ensure our exporting and revenue-earning industries remain competitive in the world markets, so that this much-needed revenue grows," Mrs Rinehart said.

"Instead, even without the additional massive costs of the carbon tax and the mining resource rent tax, Australia is already one of the five most expensive places in the world in which to do business.

"Things like additional FIFO (fly in, fly out) conditions, restrictions on overseas guest labour, regulations, approvals, permits, licences and attached conditions, eliminating the diesel fuel rebate, insisting on more expensive or inappropriate Australian content, etcetera, will simply add to Australia's already high costs of doing business, and less business means less revenue and fewer sustainable jobs," Mrs Rinehart said.

"We have to be much more sensible about burdening our small, export-orientated and other businesses, and resist policies that could kill the geese who lay the golden eggs," she said.

Mrs Rinehart said that unless the nation adopted more investment- and business-friendly policies, the next generation would be saddled with debt, plus the extra expense of an increasingly ageing population.