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Direct support to those industries with a future

7 comments

In The Australian today (subscription required):

“‘A major report released today by Rio Tinto shows just how foolish ACTU president Ged Kearney is to dismiss mining as merely ‘digging things out of the ground’.”

Written by Henry Ergas

February 6th, 2012 at 3:03 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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7 Responses to 'Direct support to those industries with a future'

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  1. If they’re “just digging things out of the ground”, why do the unions think miners should be paid so much?

    Morons.

    Boy on a bike

    6 Feb 12 at 6:19 am

  2. What really amazes me is that the idiots never learn from history and constantly fail to apply basic economics.

    One only has to look at the British Coal and Automotive industries and more recently the US automotive industry.

    You keep hiking up the costs and decreasing productivity eventually even the unions will have to close down, let alone the industry and workers they ‘represent’.

    CraigS

    6 Feb 12 at 7:14 am

  3. I agree with BOAB; pay miners the lowest of menial wages. After all, they just dig stuff up.

    What’s that? It’s not just digging? It’s a technical, tricky and expensive exercise burdened with substantial physical and financial risks? OK then.

    wreckage

    6 Feb 12 at 11:34 am

  4. It is quite clear that they just do not understand any industry, other than from the prism of a Union steward’s shop.

    Digging stuff out of the ground has put Australia at the forefront of a wave of high tech development in mining equipment and techniques, which we can sell overseas.

    We may as well throw the Holden funding at railway fettlers, sheep shearers and farriers for all the good it’ll do.

    A perfect summation at that link. Labor only knows how to look backwards.

    duncan

    6 Feb 12 at 4:55 pm

  5. sheep shearers

    A growth industry right now, believe it or not.

    wreckage

    6 Feb 12 at 5:12 pm

  6. The report’s findings (available at http://www.baeconomics.com.au) are striking: automation is comprehensively transforming mining. Within a decade, that transformation will lead to a “mine of the future” in which myriad robotic devices, controlled from vast distances, undertake functions ranging from tunnelling to blasting, sorting and transporting ores.

    So in short order all mining will be carried by robots remote controlled from India and China via the NBN? That’s what I call a ‘lock out’.

    Forester

    6 Feb 12 at 10:31 pm

  7. sheep shearers

    A growth industry right now, believe it or not.

    Growth, or cyclical?

    duncan

    7 Feb 12 at 8:22 am

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