by A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly],
The Australian Financial Review, June 17, 1977, p. 3.

Recently I visited the Pilbara in Western Australia and I took Eccles along. It does him good to leave his ivory tower in Canberra, but he gets awfully nervous.

Before he left he read a big book on how to survive in the desert and he had it indexed so that he could quickly look up the symptoms and cure for snakebite, heatstroke, starvation, broken legs and so on.

And, of course, he remembered the stern injunction not to leave the vehicle in any circumstances, so we had great difficulty in levering him from the Land Rover when we were looking at minerals.

He kept on looking back over his shoulder all the time if he got more than a chain away.

And he went through an intensive course of geology and was able to stun us all by chattering away about the age of the various rocks he saw.

Once he became quite violent in his opinion that a certain formation was 400 million years old.

Some of the party were quite merciless in kidding Eccles along and one said that the formation looked a little older, perhaps 405 million years.

Away Eccles went, galloping after this argument but taking care that he didn’t get too far from the vehicle in the chase.

The most striking thing about the trip was the size and number of the iron ore deposits. We seemed to be trudging across, or bouncing over, ore bodies without end.

Some were richer than others, some had more or less impurities and some were more or less accessible, but to suggest that mining companies might quickly skim the cream off the deposits too soon seemed wrong. Yet this is being said in some quarters.

The second thing that hit us was the immensity of the capital investment required to get an iron ore project airborne, if I can use that term.

On the assumption that a mining company would have to pay for the railway and the port facilities, a typical iron ore venture would cost about $600 million before there was any return at all.

There was considerable argument among our party, which included State and Federal politicians about how much government intervention there should be in mining — how much say should the Government have in the location of the railway or the port, for instance.

I gave tongue on this subject, saying that minerals were the people’s heritage and we must make certain that our heritage wasn’t raped.

I was rather proud of this line of eloquence which had a fine robust ring about it.

The gist of my plea was that Governments, being the people’s representatives, should see that the people’s heritage wasn’t sold too cheaply or that the mines were brought into production in the right order or that the railway lines or ports were located in the right places.

In short, I thought that the Government should do a lot of backseat driving of the mining car.

Eccles was very critical of this attitude. He says that the mining companies are putting up the money and have a perfect right to build ports where it suits them provided they don’t jeopardise the position of others, and they paid the full cost of port establishment.

And he disagreed about the wisdom of government intervention in the way the mines should be worked.

I wanted the Government to insist that the inferior ore be processed at the same time as the superior ones but Eccles wouldn’t have this.

He said that companies should be allowed to sell the best first and so cover their port and railway construction costs as quickly as possible so that they then would be able to economically treat the poorer ores.

So Eccles’s plea was for less backseat driving by the Government. And, when I kept referring with a sob in my voice to the likelihood of ghost towns appearing if things were left to the companies, he was unrepentant.

He thought that the Government should insist that, before any agreement with the mining companies was signed, the companies should be responsible for clearing up any unwanted mining town if it couldn’t be sold to the tourist industry, which seems likely in the Pilbara.

The Pilbara is a big man’s country. But many big companies are now said to be fearful of investing here since the Government’s Fraser Island decision. Eccles says that this has done Australian development great damage.

Having uttered this awful heresy, Eccles bolted to the safety of his ivory tower like a rabbit up a log.