Despite the predictions of those who want to tell us that the Australian mining boom is all but over, the Bureau of Resources Gave some interesting news today. Apparently we are up for a further 500 Billion of new projects.....

That's FIVE HUNDRED BILLION. Think about it for a second. In fact think about every second for 31 years, and you have a billion seconds. If each of those dollars was a second it would be 15,000 years ago. The last great ice age when we were just cavemen scratching on walls.

That is a shedload of investment in Australia.

To quote today's newspaper:

ALL of the investment in the mining boom to date is but a shadow of what's about to come, according to the latest update by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics.
The analysis identifies "advanced projects" worth a jaw-dropping $260.8 billion, as well as a second category of less-advanced projects worth $242.4 billion.


http://www.watoday.com.au/business/m...#ixzz1vsn2Gy00


Add that to that my other thread, where they are going to bring in 1700 English speaking workers for ONE project alone.....


No matter what some fools say, Australia is doing ok.

Slaphead isn't the worry for Australia with the mining boom right now is that the rest of the economy is not really going anywhere at the moment with the dollar strength sucking the life out of manufacturers in particular and Australian banks not really bothered about lending to small businesses and/or residential mortgages?

The China outlook isn't as rosy as it was and the mining boom is directly linked with Chinese growth so a Greek default is going to hit chinas main export market i.e europe and usa, slowing down china and as a result the mining sector...Basic supply and demand economics really.

p.s you look like you've got a reasonably full head of hair in that snap. Has it gone downhill since dec 09?!

The photo is from 2004 - but I haven't changed much since then. Still a full head of hair.

I will put up a recent one. Commie wants to see me smiling anyway.

It's true that the Australian economy is adjusting to the market forces.

Let me put it this way. If you go to the Establishment Bar in Sydney you will find a bunch of bankers and stockbrokers drinking expensive beers and talking about mining. They have never been to one. Up the road there are hairdressers who haven't either. Very few Australians actually do any mining, and most of them shudder at the thought, but all of them want a nice lifestyle.

Everyone wants a slice of the booming Australia, but 99.9% of them don't ever want to go to the shithole outback where the money is coming from. it's s long way from anywhere, boring, and hard work.

What is happening is an adjustment - just like the one when the wool boom ended, and like the gold rush one. The money isn't where everyone likes living. You either get off your arse and go for the money or you take a cut in living standards..... The Australian economy isn't a charity. You have to adapt or you lose out. It's just like the closure of the ports or the steel industry in the UK. You have to move on.

As you might gather from comments on BE, most people don't even want to live in Perth. They should try some of the mining areas! Everyone wants to live in a leafy suburb of Melbourne or Sydney, sip Chardonnay, shop in the malls, and earn $180k. Sadly life isn't like that, and market forces are forcing the change. To earn the money you are going to do dirty and hard work, and you and your family are going to live in an unpleasant place. Very few have woken up to that fact yet....


I can sum it up by reporting something I wrote here on the update thread a couple of years ago:


The Price of Minerals.

Long ago I was part of a team working on a project. An army of engineers, platers, boilermakers, electricians, fabricators, welders, formers, concreters, builders and many more sweated and toiled in the outback.

Slowly a giant leviathan took shape in the Never Never.

Teams of men would labour day and night in the assembly zones, slowly constructing some strange component. Finally it would be dragged out and hauled into place, and its purpose would become apparent. Such is the nature of huge projects. Seemingly chaotic, piece by piece, hour by hour.

We lived hard. Some harder than others. Four to a motel room, caravans. I think some even lived in tents. We got drunk and partied. We were multinational band of brothers to make Henry proud.

We had a team of Maori riggers. They were a rough bunch, and yet I found them amicable. I was warned not to cross them when they had been drinking. I never did.

Early one evening I was in my $50 a night motel room. I remember I had drawings all over the bed, trying to understand something. There was a knock and two Maoris came in.

“Need your car boss”.

I had a nice car, courtesy of avis. Leather and aircon. It only moved the short distance from the motel to the site, and I often loaned it to anyone who needed a car. Most of the guys had Utes or vans.

The Maoris had never borrowed it before. I looked at their faces and saw a look for the first time. I recognise it now as shock, horror and desperation. I threw them the keys.

Minutes later I saw them put one of the Maoris into the back seat, in the manner than the police put an arrested man into a car. My first thought was he must have killed someone and they were doing a runner. He hadn’t.

His daughter had been run over in New Zealand.

They rushed him to an airport. Someone managed to get him a flight.

She was dead before he even left Australia.

The next day the Maoris didn’t work. They went off and did whatever they do when a death occurs.

The father never returned. The others changed, although I can’t explain how. The whole site did in a small way. The parties seemed less fun.

Maybe someone put a curse on the plant. It closed soon after commissioning.

I stand in the Establishment, or the Ivy, and I hear bankers and stockbrokers talk about our booming economy. About the minerals resources they are trading.

They don’t know the cost.

An awful lot can happen in a very short time that will completely change those figures and without doing any research about the body behind those stats, stats are often compiled for vested interests and to push certain agendas as i am sure you are well aware.

But whatever happens Australia has done well and will continue to do for a while to come yet from mining. What i don't understand is why everyone is so desperate to do it all at once, surely it would be better and more sustainable to have a slow and protracted resource period. They should be thinking of the next 150 years not just the next 10.

I agree but some of these projects are well down the track liedered as being at an "advanced stage".

And the 500 billion is just new projects.

In the six months ended April 30, there were 25 major projects completed in Australia at a record value of $23.6 billion, almost double the previous record value when $12.5 billion worth of projects was completed in the six months to April 2008.

The record value of completed projects was underpinned by the completion of the Pluto LNG project at a capital cost of almost $15 billion, as well as a $3.4 billion expansion of the Worsley alumina refinery.

That's around 24 Billion worth of projects completed in 6 months. 36 Billion in the last 12 months. That's completed. Not talked about. Not planned, but completed!

Considering that the world is in turmoil and recession, it's bloody incredible.

The world is in recession? C'mon Mr Facts...give us some growth figures!

So, in short, the government was right all along? They said the mining companies were full of it when they cried poor and said they would have to shelve projects due to the new MRRT.

Um, it would've been $1 trillion if it hadn't been for those commies!

But does that all stay in Australia? sure i read a fair chunk ends up overseas.

I agree the figures are vast and yes papilon in a nutshell a fair chunk of it is. It depends who you believe. Undoubtedly continued growth in China and India is essential and I read somewhere there was only a 1% increase in demand for iron ore throughout the whole of last year.

This is quite an interesting article, not sure on the posts agenda etc I've never come across it before but pause for thought as to whether its worth the cost and damage it seems to be apparently doing to the normal part of the economy, because as slaphead rightly says mining comes on the scale and speed its happening in WA comes with a huge cost:

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches...iction-economy

As you might gather from comments on BE, most people don't even want to live in Perth. They should try some of the mining areas! Everyone wants to live in a leafy suburb of Melbourne or Sydney, sip Chardonnay, shop in the malls, and earn $180k. Sadly life isn't like that, and market forces are forcing the change. To earn the money you are going to do dirty and hard work, and you and your family are going to live in an unpleasant place. Very few have woken up to that fact yet....

Good point do you think we will see places like Port headland, Tom Price and Karratha become major cities in time, presumably with the money floating around there it will become economically viable to pump in water from the ord river and create a northwestern Australian conurbation. I would have thought if australia's population is going to grow to 40 plus million then the melbournes, sydneys, Gold coasts and brisbanes of this world are going to become very different and quite possiblly considerably less desirable places to live if they're going to take all the strain...

I'm not surprised the prossies are making lots of money outside the capital cities.

Profits from the mining often flow overseas, and a large chunk of thr construction and design pobsnly low overseas too.

But some of it remains here. We need to work on getting a bigger slice.

But as I mentioned, so long as australians won't go to the mountain, others will.