vote your shares - use your proxy, page-11

The reason why I originally invested in NST was because of the success of Paulsens and a pure gold play. I think there is no doubt that had they stuck with focusing on Paulsens alone and not do that capital raising the share price would be rising considerably faster with a smaller number of shares and the extremely good Internal Rate of Return of funds employed just in Paulsens. The Copper transaction no doubt will generate a far lesser IRR then Paulsens (unless we are lucky again) therefore a larger NST will now experience slower (but probably still an acceptable) SP growth over time.
In terms of risk however this is probably the trade off. I have not done enough research on the copper deposit/transaction to assess whether it is a "dud" or has real potential. I suspect it is high risk at this stage. However look at it from overall risk, NST is derisking itself from being a single mine gold producer to potentially being copper producer, Paulsens and Ashburton Gold producer (3 mines in total). This would makes a water problem as experienced recently in Paulsens less significant in a 3 mine company. Exposure to both Gold and Copper also derisks NST from being a single commodity company. I like both Gold and Copper. Good to see today's SP recover to 67cents pre announcement price even on the back of a lower gold price !!!!