Here’s a cut and paste from the AFR which may hold relevant information for AVL’s forward path;
Anybody want to comment on potential leads mentioned in the article that may lead to happy endings for AVL?
To fasten on an obvious one that may be relevant to AVL is the fact there’s an AFR Mining Summit this Wednesday in Perth.
Will AVL be represented?
WA to push Labor on mining ties Tom RabeWA political correspondent
West Australian Premier Roger Cook insists Labor’s thumping federal election win has not diluted the influence he wields over the Albanese government, and warned Canberra he will persist with confrontational advocacy of the state’s mining industry in the face of environmental reform.
Cook believes Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will play a more direct role in brokering a middle ground with WA’s powerful mining sector as the federal government tries again to overhaul environmental laws after abandoning green reforms in its first term.
WA Premier Roger Cook: “I’ll be buggered if I’m going to be part of a deal that simply protects other states because they haven’t managed their budgets.” Trevor Collens
WA delivered federal Labor a slim majority government in 2022 and enjoyed unparalleled leverage over Albanese’s policy direction on matters including environmental reforms and GST allocation. Albanese’s dominant May victory now means the federal government would hold a healthy majority even without the 11 Labor seats in WA, but Cook said that doesn’t mean he’s lost influence.
“Not at all … we have really delivered for federal Labor and the prime minister acknowledges that,” Cook told The Australian Financial Review. “The day after the prime minister swears his cabinet in, he pays WA a visit … that’s a signal that he really wants to do business in WA.”
Cook has no plans to water down his up-front approach to federal-state relations.
If anything, the premier thinks WA has been guilty of being a passenger in national policy discussions and wants that to change, foreshadowing a more active role in looming debates on environmental reforms and any GST shake-up.
“I will be as parochial and as noisy and as confrontational as any WA premier, but the strategy I want to take is that we tend to, in WA, wait for something to be done to us and then protest about it,” he said. “I’ll be buggered if I’m going to be part of a deal that simply protects other states because they haven’t managed their budgets.”
The premier said Perth company Woodside’s recent move to develop a $US17 billion ($26.5 billion) gas project in Louisiana was an example of how easily cash could flow offshore, and underscored the need to provide a stable regulatory environment.
“It does emphasise how flexible international capital is, and how, in a globally competitive world and in an uncertain world, governments have to provide certainty for companies to be able to give them the confidence to invest,” Cook said.
New Environment Minister Murray Watt will visit WA this week, having promised not to seek another delay to Woodside’s application to extend the life of its North West Shelf gas project after his predecessor, Tanya Plibersek, twice extended a deadline for the decision.
Speaking to the Financial Review ahead of the paper’s Mining Summit in Perth on Wednesday, Cook gave a qualified endorsement of Canberra’s plan to create a national critical minerals stockpile, adding that he didn’t yet understand how it would work.
“Ultimately, you’d never want to have a missile being fired at you that’s actually got your rare earths in its guidance systems,” he said.
“I wholly support the federal government playing a role in ensuring we’ve got sovereign capability and access to critical minerals. How it works, though, I’m not sure.”
Cook said he would be travelling to China later this year to strengthen ties with the state’s biggest trading partner. He said developing a sovereign supply of minerals needed to be balanced against maintaining important international relationships.
“I think China would accept that we all want to have sovereign capacity, manufacturing capacity and sovereign supply chains, but we do, you know, need to pay careful attention to that relationship so that we can continue to enjoy the strength of the trades that we have,” he said.
The government will invest billions in decarbonising the energy grid and readying industrial areas to provide an attractive environment for companies to pursue green iron production.
However, Cook said the major miners were big enough to invest in these projects without future state government subsidies.
“They are [big enough], but they will need help, particularly in terms of the energy supply chain,” he said.
Cook believes Japan is quickly emerging as a major partner for a future green iron industry.
“I’ve had conversations just this week with large resource companies from Japan … all of them acknowledging that they are looking for opportunities in WA to process further,” he said.
“You’ll see steelmakers in Japan wanting to undertake some of that early production themselves in Western Australia.”
AVL Price at posting:
1.2¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
A personalised tool to help users track selected stocks. Delivering real-time notifications on price updates, announcements, and performance stats on each to help make informed investment decisions.
(20min delay)