Swann and his mentors, do not realise that before miners go in for mining any ore from any mineral, exploration for the mineral or metal, has to be conducted.

Exploration in mining is like research and development in other industries. Explorers use:

* Geology.

* Geophysics.

* Geochemistry.

* Intuition.

* Then if a promising possibility starts to appear, drilling.

Finally, if positive results follow, they then have to finance a large, close order drilling programme involving many millions of dollars to assess the size, shape, length, depth and width of the occurrence.

After that, Mining Engineers with the expertise to do so, plan the mining and extraction process.

Quite often, several alternatives are explored by these experts, as they decide what the optimum design, and tonnage per annum will be. Also will an underground or open cut operation produce optimum results.

Appropriate milling and smelting designs follow.

Then the accountants and financiers arrive. All use their particular expertise to decide whether the deposit is economic or not.

Everybody involved has to accept the fact that miners are price takers and the market for minerals is volatile. Finally the decision is made.

All of the following have to be built.

* Town, airport, and all of a town’s facilities.

* Dam or dams for water supplies.

* Roads and rail lines.

* A port and facilities developed.

Many obstacles have to be overcome, such as Native Title, Green objections to everything, and permission from every authority there is to proceed. This process can take years.

By this time expenditure can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. On large deposits, it can be up to a billion dollars. All of this is somebody’s risk capital.

Should it be deemed economic, Mr. Swann, then declares it the property of the Australian people.

What could be fairer than that?

Naturally, says Swann, explorers will be rushing in from everywhere to discover and find payable ore for “the people”.

But under his scheme, taxpayers will actually be liable for 40 per cent of the losses incurred by the mining sector.

The labor proposals nullify the profit and loss system on which entrepreneurs depend to guide them in investment decisions.

The Labor Party proposals effectively nationalise the mining industry, making us all liable for corporate losses. 

When Lenin became dictator of The USSR, he declared that the land and resources, factories and banks become the assets of the Russian state.

Labor’s proposals mirror his actions. Think that over.

The sole reason health, hospitals and education matters are in hopeless continuous turmoil is that state interventions have nullified the profit and loss system. What Labor is proposing is that the entire exploration and mining industry goes down the same disastrous track.

Interested people can read Ludwig von Mises lecture, which he delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society at Beauvallon, France in September 1951 titled “Profit and Loss” See: 

http://mises.org/resources/3736/Profit-and-Loss

488 Words.

The fact that something has gone up in value does not justify you confiscating the increase in value. What ever happened to the idea that a deal is a deal?

The deal that the miners thought they had done was that they would pay a certain amount per volume, irrespective of what they made from it. That’s a good deal for the state when prices are low and a good deal for miners when they are high.

There is no justification for taking more money from the miners at this stage just because they are now enjoying the upside in the deal. It was always part of the deal.

Imagine I agree to sell my house to you for $500,000, and then twelve months later I find you have wold it on for $1,000,000. Do you think I should be allowed to retrospectively redo the sale to you and receive part of your proceeds because if I’d known it would have been worth more in 12 months I would have asked more?

That is essentially what the federal government is doing.

Your last paragraph means you don’t agree that the states should exist. You’re entitled to that view, but it doesn’t represent the legal situation so can’t form part of government policy in a country that respects its laws. You change the nature of the states, you don’t find ways to appropriate their assets.