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Will the mining increase enough to bring more people over? Aside from food and water, mining is one of those always essential to civilization activities. Dont large population centers spring up around mining operations? Look at how the gold rush transformed California, or what coal mining did for Pennsylvania, or Oil has done for Texas and Williston ND, or Alberta Canada.
Mining has existed in WA for at least 100 years. There are booms and busts. We're in a boom now. Probably on the other side of the boom. If we were having this discussion in 2001 then you could have probably done something.
Mining is not that labour intensive once the mine is built.
Dont large population centers spring up around mining operations?
Yes and no.
The only big population centres around mining operations in WA are Port Headland, Karratha and Kalgoorlie, the bulk of the mining workforce reside in Perth or other interstate cities and are what they call "fly in/fly out" , meaning for example they do two weeks work on a mine then they fly them back for a week.
Will the mining increase enough to bring more people over? Aside from food and water, mining is one of those always essential to civilization activities. Dont large population centers spring up around mining operations? Look at how the gold rush transformed California, or what coal mining did for Pennsylvania, or Oil has done for Texas and Williston ND, or Alberta Canada.
A lot of the workers live in the Big Cites (including the ones on the east coast) and are flown by the company that employs them to the North West of Western Australia or wherever the mine is. They are housed in temporary accommodation like caravans or demountable buildings for one month or whatever time period they work is, and are then flown by the company back to the city they live in for a two week break. This just keeps repeating itself and repeating itself and that is how a lot of miners live.
The towns that do exist near the mining sites are prohibitively expensive, check out this "mansion" for sale in the central Queensland Coal Mining Town or Moranbah, its going for $800k and rents almost $3000 a week.
As someone who worked in WA (The Pilbara region) for a short time, I can tell you that these days the money really isn't anything to write home about for MOST people. In my case driving the big iron ore trains I would make the same money (maybe even a bit less) in WA than I do here in NSW driving freight/coal. The only reason I went there for a while was because I liked the idea of 2 weeks on/2 weeks off FIFO.
If I had to work over there, I'd only consider living in or near Perth. It's a VERY isolated place. Not really for me. Unless someone is in some specialist field where they can make mega $$$, the eastern states are a far better place to be.
It's just a bit overrated in my opinion.
Oh, don't forget QLD & NSW have huge mining industries too. And it's located in far nicer areas to live!
Seeing as Western Australia has so much mining, is there a lot of manufacturing as well? The transport costs would be very cheap.
Labour costs are not exactly cheap though and labour isn't all that plentiful either. The manufacturing industry constitutes a similar percentage of the workforce as seen in other states, but the sector is rather small and diminishing in Australia.
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