Last Friday November 15, I had the great pleasure of being the special guest convener of a panel discussion at Euroz Hartleys annual ‘Bringing the West to the East’ lunch held at the MCA, The Rocks, Sydney.

The panel comprised three of Australia’s leading small-mid cap company executives: Luke Creagh, MD of Ora Banda Mining, Darren Cook, CEO of Fire Fly Metals and Tony Ottaviano, MD/CEO of Liontown Resources.

Our Discussion centred around:

1. Todays challenges of running a mining house with the ever present, long-arm of government often frustrating project development/operations and how might parties better collaborate moving forward?

2. The Australian productivity dilemma and the mining industry’s disappointing performance and starring role in this economic malady.

3. Who are the influential executives out there that have helped shaped each of your management styles and what is one valuable lesson you have learnt in making your businesses the success they are today?

4. How does the next 5 years look for each of your businesses, notwithstanding where commodity prices might be?

In aggregate the message was clear and uniform. There is a very bright future ahead for our extractive industries, but government support is needed, inter alia, to ensure the appropriate labour skills are being produced at our tertiary institutions to meet expanding demand. Australia remains a world leader in mining expertise, processes and safe workplaces.

The challenges of defining and measuring productivity were raised and the belief that business simplification was key and that there was no substitute for the ruthless pursuit of optimized cost structures and profitable throughput growth.

The prognosis for the next 5 years…. for Ora Banda the production ‘Drive to 150’ (and beyond?) is critically important, for Fire Fly it is getting engineering and upscale studies set for FID and Liontown it is prosecuting a revised mine plan and ultimately consideration be given to downstream processing for the group.