With iron ore prices going through the roof, last year the company which owns the mine, Roy Hill Holdings, recorded a 60 per cent increase in earnings to $2.2 billion.

Mr Veldsman also highlighted how a slow vaccine rollout was causing headaches for the industry as it struggled to get hold of shutdown crews who travelled from state to state and project to project.

Evolution Mining executive chairman Jake Klein, whose company is a gold-focused miner with projects across Australia and Canada, echoed the sentiment of Mr Veldsman in talking about how there had been difficulties in accessing skilled workers for short periods of time.

“We are having shutdowns and you’re needing to bring skills in from interstate, that’s proving to be more challenging now,” he said.

“If these border shuts continue I think that’s going to be an increasing challenge to get equipment and people to site with specific skills to do a specific job.

“Generally on the east coast, the pressure seems to be less than on the west coast.

“We haven’t felt the pressure yet. And I’m hopeful that that’s because the culture of the organisation the retention schemes we have in place, the performance schemes we have in place, the culture we have in the organisation are such that people want to stay.”

Mr Klein said the only way forward was to get more people vaccinated but there were problems with the rollout.

“I’m really disappointed at how we’ve gone from thinking, you know, we were leading the world in terms of managing the pandemic when there wasn’t a vaccine to now there is a vaccine and we seem to be way, way behind the rest of the world,” he said.

The gold boss was lukewarm on mandatory vaccinations on mine sites and talked about how such a measure would be guided by government policies and legal pathways.

“We’re doing everything we possibly can to encourage our workforce to get vaccinated,” Mr Klein said.

Loading

“The alternative I think is getting tested on a very frequent basis, but that’s not as good as having a fully vaccinated workforce.”

The Minerals Council of Australia met with COVID-19 Taskforce Commander Lieutenant-General John Frewen on Tuesday to outline how it could help the Federal Government with the vaccine rollout and support its workforce and communities.

The organisation said in a statement it was working with its member companies on how the vaccine could be delivered to operational mine sites and through regional hubs when sufficient supplies of vaccine are available.

“While there are significant logistical challenges ahead, the industry will play its part in a coordinated and united national effort to increase vaccination rates so mining can continue to operate while workers, families and communities are kept safe from the virus,” the statement said.

Northern Star Resources chief executive Stuart Tonkin said the industry had to be mindful of not getting into a situation where it was getting vaccines ahead of other vulnerable sectors of the community.