Ministerial Statement

Northern Gawler Craton

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:01): I seek leave to make a ministerial statement.

Leave granted.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS: The mineral resources industry is a substantial contributor to the success of the South Australian economy. In fact, today the ABS released new data showing that mining contributed around 35 per cent of South Australia's total capital expenditure in the September 2023 quarter. In the September quarter, the sector contributed $963 million. In current price terms, this is the highest South Australian quarterly mining capital expenditure recorded by the ABS since 1989. It is important we continue to support the sector, and we do that in a number of ways, including providing contemporary precompetitive data.

Today is Discovery Day, which is an annual technical conference established in 2016 bringing together the Geological Survey of South Australia's expert team and its collaboration partners with industry. It is an opportunity to engage with industry and scientific peers to highlight the work of our Geological Survey, including discoveries, findings and opportunities for the future.

Today, at the conference, our Geological Survey will announce a second drilling campaign as part of the MinEx CRC national drilling initiative in the northern Gawler Craton area. The National Drilling Initiative (NDI) is a collaboration between the commonwealth and state to implement geoscience programs that use innovative techniques to gather new scientific data and information about the potential mineral, energy and groundwater resources concealed beneath the surface. This is an opportunity to increase exploration investment, potentially leading to new mineral discoveries in our state.

The first drilling campaign of the NDI—the Delamerian drilling campaign—was completed earlier this year. Twenty-three drillholes were completed, and data was analysed by our experts prior to being published and made freely available to industry. This led to the release of tenement acreage to the exploration industry through a competitive bid process in mid-2023, with successful applicants now primed to explore areas previously left unexplored for decades.

The second drilling program is seeking the same outcomes to deliver new, timely and previously missing data from our state's geological database to drive new exploration programs and mineral discoveries. The northern Gawler Craton area is an underexplored terrain with geological similarities to highly prospective mineral provinces, including:

the Olympic Copper-Gold Province, which hosts Olympic Dam, Carrapateena and Prominent Hill mines; and

parts of Northern Australia that host world-class mines, such as Ernest Henry and Mount Isa.

The Geological Survey and MinEX CRC will undertake pre-competitive geoscience to understand the fundamental geology of the area that will inform new exploration ideas, models and programs in this frontier region.

All the data gathered by the Geological Survey will feed into the South Australian Resources Information Gateway (SARIG), which is the number one ranked geological database in the world as declared by the pre-eminent Annual Survey of Mining Companies conducted by the Fraser Institute. To further our lead in this space, the Geological Survey will also announce today the release of its new critical mineral dashboards, which are interactive maps enabling exploration and mining companies to access and interact with our extensive geological database in new and easier ways.

We cannot understate the value of our Geological Survey and its pre-competitive data programs in stimulating industry activity and enhancing exploration activity in this state. If we have not achieved it already, we are well on the way to having the best Geological Survey in the country, if not the world.