Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to thank the Prime Minister for his visit last week to your home town, Madam Acting Deputy Speaker Price, the city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. While the big-ticket item was the welcome announcement that the Goldfields region would be the next site for a cashless debit card trial, another fantastic announcement slightly slipped under the radar.

Today I inform the chamber that on the weekend the Prime Minister announced a new $100 million scheme to stimulate investment in mining exploration, which is a fantastic result for the mining industry and completes what I think has been a positive week for the Goldfields region. This innovative Junior Mineral Exploration Tax Credit scheme is a replacement for the discontinued Exploration Development Incentive. Similar to the EDI, the program allows junior explorers reporting losses for greenfield exploration to offer a tax credit to their investors. We have dubbed this initiative the Junior Mineral Exploration Tax Credit, but it is more than a rebranding of its predecessor.

Three years of the EDI taught us some valuable lessons, given the industry take-up of the scheme was less than we hoped and evidence suggested it wasn't achieving its intended purposes. Because the EDI had a cap on maximum expenditure for each year, we applied a modulation factor to manage the limited pool of funds available. Essentially, if the scheme was oversubscribed and the submissions exceeded the cap for that financial year, applicants would receive a reduced pro rata portion of what they expected. This created a degree of uncertainty for investors, given companies would not be able to guarantee an offer back to the market. We've removed the modulation factor and applied a first-in-best-dressed method that will ensure successful applicants are guaranteed the tax credit they sought.

The other important factor of the JMETC is that only newly issued shares relating to capital raising for new greenfield exploration activity will be eligible for these tax credits. This scheme is expected to leverage $300 million of investment and exploration over the next four years.

The latest figures for gold exploration in Western Australia are positive, but we know that there is no justification for the industry and government to rest on their laurels. We're still short of the investment in exploration that we saw several years ago, and it is my hope that, as a government, we can help the industry return to that very high level.

I want to give a big shout-out to Simon Bennison, Graham Short and his team at AMEC for the hard work that they did in getting this proposal back up before the government.

On that note, it is with great pleasure that I will be attending the opening of the Independence Group's Nova nickel mine at the Fraser Range, 130 kilometres east of Norseman, this Friday. It was discovered in 2012 by prospector Mark Bennett's Sirius Resources. This is a classic story of greenfield exploration opening up enormous opportunities in the Goldfields economy. The Nova mine will produce, in financial year '18, 25,000 tonnes of nickel, 11,000 tonnes of copper and around 1,000 tons of cobalt, bringing much-needed jobs and income to the national, state and local economies. I want to congratulate Independence Group Chairman Peter Bilbe and Managing Director Peter Bradford and their team for bringing this project to fruition and wish them all the best in the future.

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