Dealer of the Year Award – Hancock Prospecting

The original ‘no politics’ baby of the Diggers and Dealers conference was tossed out with the bath water with the presentation of the Digger of the Year Award.

Below is the text of the forum chairman Barry Eldridge’s speech.

In the current interesting economic times the amount of economic development currently in the pipeline by the Australian resources sector is truly remarkable and tends to be the centrepiece of much of the Government propaganda when they promote the robustness of the Australian economic credentials, although one could be confused that Government decisions are primarily responsible for all the good things that happen in our economy.

Personally I am much more relaxed about the economic benefits that are derived from deals done to advance resource projects for instance than the sustainable benefits from those famous pink batts or the $900 that some were given to buy that television made overseas. However, maybe I just don’t understand.

One thing I do understand is that Julia and Wayne seem to have spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy focused on the activities of the matriarch of the winner of this year’s Dealer of the year award.

Yes we have determined that the stand out deal in our view for 2012 were the deals undertaken by Hancock Prospecting in securing premium strategic partners to develop the Roy Hill iron ore project in Western Australia while maintaining majority equity in the project.

Hancock Prospecting has maintained 70% equity in the project while encouraging its partners, South Korea’s Posco, Japan’s Marubeni and South Korea’s STX Corporation to invest approximately $3.2 billion to participate.

We have heard a lot about the supposedly controversial ability to use up to 1,700 international employees to assist in construction although we have seen little encouragement about the 6,000 other jobs that this project will deliver.

As mentioned in the Financial Review, we should reflect on how proud we as Australians are of the Snowy River project which was largely built on imported labour and embrace the fact that we live in an international society and should be able to access labour from where ever if there is a lack of available labour in Australia as we currently experience.

At Diggers and Dealers we prefer to celebrate achievement and we are pleased to recognise the achievements associated with this robust project and ask executive director Tad Watroba and chief development officer John Klepec to accept the Dealer of the Year award on behalf of Hancock Prospecting.