Resources Sector

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (14:59): My question is to the Minister for Energy and Mining. Can the minister update the house on what the Marshall Liberal government is doing to assist the resources sector during the COVID-19 crisis?

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart—Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:59): This is a very important question from the member for Flinders, who I know has a very objective view with regard to the resources industry, which I respect enormously. The resources industry is incredibly important to our state. We have about 22,000 South Australians employed in the resources sector. It accounts for 50 per cent of our exports and $6.9 billion of value in our economy, so it is an incredibly important sector.

It also contributes royalties—about $300 million of royalties—and those royalties to the South Australian government are then used to contribute funding to schools, roads, nurses, police officers, disability services, and a wide range of other things. So there are a lot of reasons why we want the resources industry to stay profitable, stay operating and stay as much untouched by this virus as it possibly can be.

We are supporting the resources industry in many ways, particularly with regard to fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out workers crossing borders. We have had tremendous cooperation between the government, industry bodies, regulatory bodies, other states and the companies themselves with regard to reducing the number of employees they need to travel across states. They have been incredibly responsible about that. We see the resources industry as an essential one. We see the workers within that industry, which the individual companies identify as essential, as being very important.

We are doing everything we can to work with them in that way, including, for example, looking at the Moomba Cooper Basin area and saying that, practically, there is no need to look in that part of the world at a hard South Australian Queensland-type border, which workers cross over every day quite often in the course of their work. If we look at that region, the Queensland government has been very good in that regard.

In terms of more specific support, of course many companies will gain the benefit of the payroll tax exemption which we have put in place for companies with a payroll of below $4 million per year and which covers many companies. We are not thinking about the BHPs, the OZs, the Santoses and the Beaches, but we are thinking about the lower end of the industry and particularly the METS sector, as the mining equipment, technology and services sector is very important. There are lots of small companies there.

We have also offered deferral for exploration companies on their fees to the government—six months deferral—and also a deferral on some of the work and expenditure obligations they have to the state government. We have also done similarly in the petroleum industry with regard to deferral of fees and providing an enormous amount of flexibility for those companies so that they have committed work and expenditure programs in place to say, 'Look, we understand that, quite likely, you will not be able to deliver all of this, so we will help you.'

The reason we are doing this is that we want these companies to stay afloat. We want these companies to be there when we come out the other end of this virus. This is very important because these are the companies—small, medium and large—in the resources sector that will be able to give our economy and our South Australians in work an enormous boost coming out the other end. The more we can do to support these companies through this difficult time, the more they will contribute back to the South Australian economy.

The resources industry has been critical for 150 years in South Australia, and it is also one of the industries that can give us the greatest growth in our gross state product in years to come, particularly soon after the coronavirus pandemic passes us.