Upcoming Catalysts, page-388

Lovely for the short-term market perception and the immediate bottom line. But if you are a professionally credible company that is seriously evaluating the economics of mining a 10-year mine-life gold deposit, and both Antipa and their potential suitors are, then you would not want to destroy your credibility with blatantly over-optimistic inputs to your scoping or feasibility studies.

And equally, you would not want to go into production on over-optimistic assumptions and then wind on that vast rubbish heap of failed Australian mining projects that were put into production based on market-titillating but fundamentally flawed studies, and then when bankrupt a couple of years later.

The gold price is having a fantastic run at the moment, but markets change and they can change a lot in the course of a ten-year mine life. Gold goes up, and gold goes down, and the price dip we lived through in 1999 killed the exploration industry for five years and closed almost every gold mine in western Australia. There were 40,000 geologists out of work, most of them with pockets full of worthless scrip. And I was one of them.

It is having a nice run right now though. Thank God. And long may it last.