WHY IS EVN MINING GOING SOUTH?, page-45

I generally think vaccination will ramp up from now and a lot of the state border restrictions start to lift. So some of the spike in domestic labour costs might be 'transitory' in that sense. International labour mobility another discussion but I'm not sure that is a major issue in an operational sense.

The level of construction activity in WA mining is still fairly small relative to 2010-13. There aren't mega projects in the range of $10B+ like there were then. Those mega projects are the ones that really drive up wages and bring in the overseas workers etc. GR Engineering who build most of the gold processing plants hadn't seen pressure on margins when they updated the market a few months ago. I'd be watching their releases for any commentary on construction labour costs.

EVN only has the one mine in WA and it's in Kalgoorlie so a lot of the labour would be local anyway. NST said in there conference call that they have very little reliance on interstate labour at their WA operations. I'd imagine Cowal has quite a lot of residential workers too being within 50km some decent size towns in NSW.