Gawler Craton Mining Exploration

Dr HARVEY (Newland) (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Energy and Mining. Can the minister update the house on recent activity in the Gawler Craton?

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart—Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:40): Thank you very much to the member for Newland for his very good question. Yes, I can update the house on activity in the Gawler Craton. I am optimistic that this is a topic that every member of this place will be very supportive of. It is an enormous amount of activity.

We would already know that the very important Olympic Dam and Prominent Hill mines operate in the Gawler Craton. The Carrapateena mine is soon to operate in the Gawler Craton. It is an incredibly prospective area for mining in our state. Mining is an incredibly important industry with regard to not only the minerals that are produced, brought to surface and, importantly, used all over the world, but also very importantly with regard to the employment opportunities. The state government is making a very important contribution at the moment through the Geological Survey of South Australia, which is a very important organisation.

Mr Hughes interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Giles is called to order.

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN: What we are currently doing is interrogating, bringing to light, making more transparent and more useful a lot of the information that already exists. The Geological Survey of South Australia is doing remarkable work in that regard by using world-renowned processes to interrogate the information that already exists so that it can be translated into incredibly useful maps for explorers to access so that their exploration dollars can be far more effective and increase the chance of success of that exploration. Hopefully, it will translate through to mining operations which support our economy very importantly.

The Gawler Craton Airborne Survey's data acquisition program is 90 per cent complete already, with 12 of the 16 data packages now available and made public to exploration companies to use. A very good example of this is what we are calling the Fowlers to Flinders program, from Fowlers Bay on the West Coast through to the Flinders Ranges, which covers west to east the Gawler Ranges.

What we are doing there is going back and interrogating the 5,500 drill core samples that we have down at Tonsley, and organisations are very welcome to come and look at them and try to go back to the work that has been done in previous decades to decide if they can gather more information. But we are actually doing some of that for them. We are going back with new scientific processes and analysing those drill core samples, as a government program, as a geological survey program, so that that information is available to organisations. So we are making that investment so that we can help industry.

Another very important development is the Oak Dam West discovery, which BHP has recently made, and BHP has shared those outstanding results with industry. What's important about that is not only BHP's success in exploration in that area, but it is so closely surrounded by many other exploration opportunities which now quite understandably seem so much more likely to be fruitful. So that is another very positive development in this area.

Another project in the district is the Lake Torrens project that Argonaut and Aeris combined are working on. It has taken 10 years to get to this, but they are drilling on Lake Torrens without touching any part of Lake Torrens, other than the platform that has been placed on top of the lake by a helicopter. Every piece of machinery, every person and every single thing that happens there will be brought in by helicopter so that important Aboriginal, cultural and environmental protections are put in place.