Mining 2017 – ’The ghosts of politics present’
- By: John P Sykes
Posted in: Blog, Media, Mineral Policy, Mining, PhD, Publications
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This week Allan Trench (University of Western Australia – UWA) and I continue our Dickensian tale of mining and politics in the Strictly Boardroom column on MiningNewPremium.net. This week we consider the ‘ghosts of politics present’, most notably Donald Trump, but also the likes of Bernie Sanders, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn, Pauline Hanson and even Bill Shorten, and what they mean for the global mining sector.
The article considers how politics of both ‘right’ and ‘left’ has made a notable lurch away from globalisation and the free movement of people – something that will impact a globalised mining sector with assets all over the world, run by employees from all over the world. There also seems to be a trend back towards a simpler, narrower definition of economic value and growth, considered more in monetary terms, with less focus on environmental and social value. This may make things more profitable for the mining sector in the shorter term, but builds up some unaddressed longer-term problems associated with the negative environmental and social externalities of mining.
The article is inspired by and drawn from the final CET scenarios workshop on the future of minerals exploration, which I ran as part of my PhD research at the Centre for Exploration Targeting, UWA, last June.
Next week we will complete the trilogy by looking at the future interaction of global politics and mining.
This week’s article was entitled: Mining 2017 – ‘The ghosts of politics present’ and is available to MiningNewsPremium.net subscribers online. Otherwise contact me for a copy.
For keen followers of the Strictly Boardroom column, our new book “Strictly (Mining) Boardroom Volume II: A Practitioners Guide for Next Generation Directors” is out now and available as a hard copy or e-book from Major Street Publishing or Amazon.
Image: ‘Scrooge’s Third Visitor’ [The Ghost of Christmas Present] from A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens, and illustrated by John Leech.