771
PRIME MINISTER
TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING MP
OPENING OF THE MCARTHUR RIVER MINING PROJECT,
NORTHERN TERRITORY, 6 SEPTEMBER 1995
E& OE PROOF COPY
Thank you indeed, Administrator, Chief Minister, Ambassador Hasegawa,
your colleagues Mr Kohno and Mr Sakamoto, the Chairman of Mt isa Mines
Mr Bruce Vaughan, distinguished members of the company, my ministerial
colleagues who are with me Laurie Brereton and Bob Collins Barry Coulter
Minister from the Northern Territory involved with the project, Warren
Snowdbn the Member for the Northern Territory, members of the Government
of the Northern Territory, other distinguished representatives and ladies and
gentlemen. It has been a great pleasure for me to be able to come here today, to
participate in this project which, I think, many will see as part of the
renaissance of one of Australia's great mining companies Mt Isa Mines.
This is a company with a great tradition in mining in this country. One that
goes back many years to that great deposit at Mt Isa and the mining of it and
in other important projects and that great pioneering and adventurous spirit
which we have seen from this company and from Australian mining.
I think we are seeing something new today. We are seeing the adventurous
spirit of Australian mining coupled with a new understanding about the
environment, new technology and social responsibility. That is what, I think,
makes this project so significant. It is not just another project. It is a project
which might not have happened though it always had the potential to happen.
It has happened because people wanted it to happen. Governments wanted
it to happen. The company with this technology wanted it to happen and they
found a partnership again with our great partners in Japan to make it happen.
All of these things, I think, are milestones in its future.
Mr Fruend ( Executive General Manager, Project Development, MIM Holdings
Limited) was kind enough to mention One Nation and yesterday I had the
pleasure of opening the new international terminal in Brisbane which was part
of the One Nation program as well. A month earlier, I had the pleasure of
joining Laurie Brereton on the One Nation train which for the first time carried
freight from Brisbane to Perth via Melbourne on a single gauge and which
tied the country together as never before and yesterday I reminded people in
Brisbane that in One Nation we removed the interface between the domestic
and international carriage of passengers, where we folded Australian Airlines
into Qantas and then made it a strong private company, where we are now
trying tobuild Ansett as an international as well as a domestic company. We
saw One Nation as pulling Australia together the very name underwrote the
concept and at the same time kick start the economy which it did and since
then, of course, we have had 16 consecutive quarters of growth. Four
straight years of growth. It is the longest phase in Australian growth in
years with low inflation at around 2.5 per cent.
We are now outgrowing most other western economies and as a
consequence we have had huge employment growth at around 4 to 5 per
cent employment growth, around three times as much as most other
comparable industrial societies.
As a consequence of One Nation we introduced something to kick start
projects such as this. And we kick started them with the investment
allowance, but they needed more than that, they needed co-operation. They
needed to be brought together and because One Nation also implied bringing
it together as one, we had a co-operative venture between the Government of
the Northern Territory, the Government of the Commonwealth, Ministers of
the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory and, of course, co-operation
with the Aboriginal community of this area. With that co-operation we gave
the lie to the notion that the Aboriginal people are opposed to development,
that things can't be done and we have given not only birth to a new mine and
to a new enterprise, but a new spirit of co-operation which will underpin the
Mabo legislation and all of the other things which will follow once we
recognise some of the essential truths that had to be recognised. That there
was a civilisation here before European people arrived. That now, because
of our High Court decision, the common law of Australia no longer comes
from European custom and tradition but also Aboriginal custom and tradition
and that the Commonwealth has enacted a piece of law which pulls together,
understands who has this title and how it can be awarded, but in the granting
of it tries to make a reparation or reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians
which is honest and real.
That is why this project is going because that good will is there. And it came
from the companies, it came from the governments and, I hope, one of the
consequences of it is that MIM which has been at various times in recent
years, in the doldrums particularly with low zinc prices, could find itself reborn
as a company, as a new age Australian company, as a can do business that
gets things done. Against the odds, it has been able to develop this project
and I certainly pay a tribute to the company. To Bruce Vaughan Chairman,
Nick Stump Chief Executive Office and to Peter Freund who was the ramrod
on the project to get it going, that these people saw something better beyond
silly factionalism and mindless politics and mean spiritedness towards the
Aboriginal communities displayed by other mining companies and they
actually got it up and got it running. At $ 300 million a year or thereabouts, if
the mine runs for 20 years we will see around $ 6 billion a very large addition
to the country's wealth and accords a large addition to its capacity to pay its
way. Let me also take this opportunity to salute the technologists because there is
a new terchnological barrier being breached here in milling this product down
to a very fine powder and then finding the extractive processes to take the
silicates et cetera from it to produce the zinc. I would say to our colleagues in
Japan I hope that they understand that when they deal with an Australian
business, and I'm sure they do, that it is real and it will be here in five years
or ten years or 15 years and that when you do business with Australia you
don't wake up in the morning, some morning, to find a general in charge of
the country, that it is the solid democracy, that our word matters that you can
litigate your interests here in our courts and like you we are a democracy and
also like you we don't have a two tiered society. We used to have the
remnants of our failed upper class, they have disappeared, thankfully, into
obscurity. And as a consequence, we have essentially, one group of
Australians as you have one group of Japanese. I think this is an important
thing, that the egalitarianism which exists in Australia also exists in Japan.
This is not well understood in Australia. It is one of the reasons we do things
together and we do them well. As the Ambassador and I know, all to happily,
of the great partnership we now have with the Government of Japan and the
people of Japan, better than a commercial partnership, a great political and
human partnership which has put the war years and the rest behind us and
where we are now, through APEC, building a great pacific rim community and
where, I think, we enjoy a relationship of trust which our two countries have
never enjoyed before and one, I think, Japan rarely enjoys with any other
country in the world. This is a matter of great pleasure to us.
I'd like to say that I hope that our Japanese colleagues Mr Kohno and
Sakamoto will find pleasure in this relationship as well as business and that
we will go on to do other great things together. Because we can, I think, be
relied upon. I'd like to take the opportunity to pay tribute to my colleagues,
one in particular, Laurie Brereton, who I have grown up with, of course, in
public life. Who pushed through all the big projects in NSW when weaker
spirits wouldn't have and who took over this transport and mining
responsibility from Bob Collins, who himself picked up the initial One Nation
projects but where Laurie had this particular task as a facilitator to try to push
this through as my Parliamentary Secretary. He did that, of course, with his
colleague beside him from the Northern Territory, Barry Coulter, and I think
Shane Stone and I here today to give evidence of that co-operation and to
say how pleased we are about it.
I hope the people of the Northern Territory can understand this. That their
media can communicate the fact that something good is going on here and
that something valuable has happened and that it is not about petty politics
and mean spiritedness or even the narrow and limited gaze of news editors.
That it is something grander than all of that and that people start to
understand these things.
I want to say a special word about the Borroloola Aboriginal community and
their good will. To the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commercial
Development Corporation ( CDC) and Mawurli Corporation partners with
Bums Philp in the Bing Bong Project which we have just seen and to say
again this is the sort of involvement that we want to see with the Aboriginal
community. Not simply royalty takers, price takers in a market, but people
who are actually engaged in the business as well. Useful, responsible
partners in the development of Australia. And if we have trust in them and
respect for them we will see more of this. But those without faith and those
without trust and those without respect will get obfuscation as they have in
the past.
I'd like to say that the freehold title, I think it is Bauhinia Downs, which the
Commonwealth has purchased and given to the Gurdanji people and the
freehold title which will come from it pleases me enormously. I was glad that
the Commonwealth could spend $ 6 million diverting the road around the
Borroloola Aboriginal community to make this a much more pleasant project
for them. That all of these things could come together and that we could
underwrite a new future of co-operation for mining and for governments and
communities in this country.
This is a great continent. It is a rich continent. It is inhabited by people who
believe in the human spirit and in democracy. There is no end to its wealth,
to its bounty, to its abundance. We only need the sense and the good will to
be able to exploit it, but to do so in a way that pays tribute to the environment.
That lets people understand that the Aboriginal community were trustees of
this place for 40,000 years and have now given it to another society in
partnership which must have respect for the land and must understand what
a great inheritance we have been given. That is why it is incumbent upon
mining companies and the exploiters of the land, the pastoralists, to
understand this point. I am very glad that MIM does and in the new age of
mining that taking the best and leaving the rest is something that does belong
to some other epoch, that doesn't belong to now.
So, respect for the environment, for the Aboriginal community, for the
economic imperatives of Australia, for co-operation for the partnership with
Japan, these are all the things that we celebrate today and why we are so
pleased to be here for the opening of this historic project.
ends