The West Australian Government needs a more targeted approach to mining redundancies after the loss of 6022 jobs in the past five months, the state opposition says.

Opposition Leader Eric Ripper said there were several measures the Government could use to alleviate job losses, including more infrastructure spending and the deferment of royalty payments.

“The Court government provided some royalty concessions to (BHP’s hot briquetted iron) HBI plant when it was in trouble,” Mr Ripper said.

“Now, ultimately, that wasn’t successful, the HBI plant did ultimately close, but that’s an example that springs to mind.

“There might be an infrastructure bottleneck issue that’s contributing to the costs of the mine.

“If the Government was ahead of the game and talking to the mining industry about these threats, they might find that there are things they can do which would contribute to keeping the mine going.”

The largest job losses in the WA mining sector have been at Ravensthorpe in the Great Southern region, where the loss of up to 1800 jobs has devastated the community.

Up to 300 workers at BHP Billiton’s operations at Mt Keith have also lost their jobs.

Rio Tinto is preparing to axe 600 jobs from its head office, Labor said, and Newcrest is shedding 400 positions at its Telfer gold mine.

Mines Minister Norman Moore told The West Australian newspaper on Monday that Labor’s past record on mining developments did not lead him to hold much hope for their job protection policies.

White Cliff Nickel Secured 100% ownership of Mt Remarkable Gold Mining Project

White Cliff Nickel has secured 100% ownership of the Mt Remarkable gold project by
acquiring the remaining 40% tenement interest. The consideration paid was $60,000 plus 1,090,000 ordinary White Cliff Nickel shares.

The Mt Remarkable tenement produced gold in the late 1800’s from shear hosted quartz veins and surrounding intermediate to felsic volcanics. Recent exploration and drilling has delineated a zone of mineralization approximately 300 metres long immediately surrounding the historical workings with best results of 1m @ 56 g/t gold.

In addition, White Cliff Nickel has identified several additional gold targets (figure 1) along structural lineaments within mafic and ultramafic sequences that appear to be associated with gold mineralization further to the North and West.

The Mt Remarkable Gold Project is located within the North Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia, approximately 170 km N-NE of Kalgoorlie and about 25 km SE of Kookynie. Major gold mines in the surrounding area include Sons of Gwalia, Tarmoola, Carosue Dam, Granny Smith, Wallaby and Sunrise Dam. The project consists of 2 tenements covering approximately 52 square kilometres over an area that includes the old workings contained within the historic Mt Remarkable Mining Centre.

White Cliff managing director Mike Langoulant said, “100% ownership of this exciting gold project allows us to accelerate our gold exploration efforts over a project area which has not been systematically explored with modern techniques despite its historic gold production.”

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