“If you want to go to be a beer garden in Germany, you actually have to have had a COVID test, or you actually would have had to actually have had both vaccines.

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“We’re going to have to start to think about implementing some of those in Australia, and industry is going to have to work with government to make it happen.”

Roy Hill has been trying to address the skills shortage with training programs for mining newcomers and a separate scheme retraining international Qantas pilots to drive trucks.

Mr Veldsman said the first pilot to complete the program had recently finished their first two weeks on the job.

“They’re used to work in a very safe environments and we see a real win-win also with the culture that they actually bring into our workforce,” he said.

Red tape pitch

Mr Veldsman made a pitch for a streamlining of state and federal government approvals to get rid of duplicate processes so the country could take advantage of current high commodity prices for metals like iron and gold.

“We see this as one of the biggest challenges over the next 12 to 24 months, especially in Western Australia, how are we going to work with government to actually remove some of these unnecessary approvals and focus on the things that make a real difference,” he said.

“If we don’t get a cultural change around our industry and government [to] work together to streamline approvals we’re really going to miss this boat.

“Prices for iron ore gold and commodities aren’t going to stay up ... and when it’s up, we need to make hay while the sun is shining.”

The nation’s mounting debt pile from the pandemic should be paid down through expanding the mining economy, according to Mr Veldsman.

Winning over hearts and minds

Roy Hill is encouraging the workforce of the future to take up a career in mining with a series of initiatives including mine trips for teachers.

Mr Veldsman said teachers provided career advice to students but did not always know much more about the mining industry than what they read in the media.

“As an industry we’re not doing a lot to actually educate our teachers about what a wonderful industry the mining industry is,” he said.

“So starting this year, Roy Hill will actually start to work with education departments to actually take final year teaching students up to our mine, up to our port and railway to actually show them what the mining industry is about.”

The company is also focusing on inviting year 5 and 6 students to training centres and other facilities to show them the ‘fun’ of mining with different simulators.

Mr Veldsman said the idea was to get children to understanding mining was about more than just digging a hole.