Making the move - real world opinion

[Hoopsuk]

Freegs said:

Apologies for the slight highjack but for all you Perth lot would be interested in how the economy, principally mining industry has changed over the last few months since this thread was started?

Indications from Mines & Money and other international conferences is that things aren't as bad as were initially predicted, bit more exploration and investment is creeping in. Is this how it feels in Oz, particularly WA?

Cheers

I work in the oil and gas industry and agree with a lot of what 200bhp said above. But it may be worse for us (relative to the mining sector) due to the massive recent reduction in oil price as well as the elevated labour costs in WA (relative to other operational areas) and the concurrent nature of the so called mega projects on the north west shelf. The redundancies and contractor axing started about 2 years ago in small numbers and as WA had 4 or 5 big projects all going into construction simultaneously and winding down together there is now less investment and therefore design work going on for future projects as well as a saturation of Engineers, managers, tradesfolk etc in the market.
The result: some of the Europeans that I knew well and worked with have upped and left, some of whom had been here for up to 20 years, many of whom had houses and children in schools.
Those of us left have had frozen salaries for the last 2 years and when our contracts run out or we are offered redundancy as staff it is unlikely we will find other jobs in WA
As no new projects are being designed right now, when the current construction period ends there will be little or no work going on for the next 5 years (at least) due to the design and procurement cycles required for significantly large projects.
Certain foreign companies that had invested in WA are leaving, the most extreme example being Apache's recent selling of the julimar field at short notice when they had already begun construction of the subsea architecture (sold for 2.5 billion i think to woodside who are themselves shedding 800 roles by attrition).

Anyway, it was good while it lasted.

[hidetheelephants]

Jader1973 said:

I suspect this is a huge issue for them.

I don't understand why the African mines aren't coming on line asap. The Chinese must be desperate to be able to churn out minerals in countries where the entire annual wage bill for the mine will be less than the cost of a handful of Aussie miners, and they have none of this OH&S nonsense to worry about.

It's Africa, so as soon as money appears there's war, rampant corruption, more war, total lack of law, war, psychotic machete wielding thugs, war, AIDS, war, and more corruption. Did I mention war? Much as the Chinese want to exploit Africa and are quite happy to look the other way for things that would get western companies on Amnesty's st list, in some countries even they don't know which of the batst crazy warlords to back in order to get access.

[Hasbeen]

Yep it has been our very stability & reliability as a supplier that is causing us problems.

Companies, & customers have been content to meet pay demands for reliable supply. Unfortunately unions & workers, as in most of the western world, have pushed & ridden their advantage, & the opportunity for overly high wages, as has usually been the case everywhere.

We lost our shipping industry, when wages for coastal shipping crews made it uneconomic to run ships here. Our white goods & electrical manufacturing industries went next.

Abattoirs were next to go, for the same reason. Our airlines can no longer compete internationally, & it is a race to see whether they or the car industry, killed the same way, goes first.

With the current oil price, the coal seam gas industry up here is getting shaky. At least that should be self correcting in the medium term, although the same may not be the case for coal.

I think it is fair to say Oz is no longer the land of milk & honey for tradesmen & engineers, that it has been for a while.

Edited by Hasbeen on Monday 26th January 06:59

[Hitch78]

I took a look at shipping crew costs as part of a project once - phenomenal.

[Hoopsuk]

Hitch78 said:

I took a look at shipping crew costs as part of a project once - phenomenal.

Thanks largely to the MUA if in Aus. I had never seen anything quite like it until I got here.