On the Level Australia’s Coronation Hill could happen here

Australia even riskier for foreign investment than Ontario? I was shocked to read recently that the government of Australia, a Commonwealth country with many parallels to ours, has ordered a halt to all mining at the gold-rich Coronation Hill discovery in its Northern Territory. The Australian aborigines consider the site sacred.

Incredulously, Prime Minister Bob Hawke persuaded his socialist labor cabinet that the local natives believe “it might disturb the God Bula who would wreak havoc in the area with earthquakes and disease.”

But that could never happen here, you say. Well, I’m not so sure. Didn’t Premier Bob Rae’s socialist New Democratic Party government recently pass into law a clause that requires Indian approval of new work permits before it can even commence in Ontario’s whole vast northern watershed? And there are other parallels.

With a population of 17 million, Australia’s 250,000 aboriginals are developing a new militancy. One of its groups has unilaterally declared a provisional government, establishing an aboriginal nation with its own land base, passports and laws. I wonder if they have ever paid taxes?

Here in this country we have a burgeoning crop of militant environmentalists who, coupled with our own aboriginals, are making astronomical land and cash demands. They’re simply waving a red flag to stop or scare off almost any new free enterprise, be it mining, logging or hydro development.

Indeed the two “Bob” governments seem tarred with the same anti-mining, anti-business brush. To drive off foreign investment, Australia’s Bob recently levied a stiff bullion tax on gold mining.

Meanwhile, Ontario’s Bob, in a display of fiscal madness, dumped a $9.7-billion dollar deficit on Ontario’s heavily overtaxed population. In bed with unions, he’s handing out juicy wage and fringe benefits, free day care, pay equity standards, minimum wage boosts and increased welfare payments. These measures tend to trim Ontario’s all-important competitive edge in world markets where the bulk of our mineral and forest production must be sold.

As well, Ontario’s Bob makes no secret that he is against all nuclear power developments. Yet in something of an about-face, he has virtually demanded that Ontario Hydro continue buying uranium from one of Elliot Lake’s low-grade high-cost underground mines at a price far in excess of that which is readily available in Saskatchewan. Furthermore, he has ordered Ontario Hydro to make an outright gift of some $65 million (from taxpayer pockets) to the community of Elliot Lake to placate laid-off miners.

Australia’s Bob, too, is certainly anti-nuclear. Blessed with 30% of the world’s known uranium reserves, his Labour Party is currently debating a policy that would restrict uranium output in that country to all but three mines in a bid he thinks will help prevent nuclear proliferation.

In a way, I rather feel sorry for Bob Rae the individual. He got into this high office almost by fluke, and quite unexpectedly. Consequently, he had very little experienced cabinet material from which to draw. But he surely chose some real misfits for whom Ontario voters will have to suffer, and pay through the nose for years to come.

The economic problems posed by environmentalists and aboriginals, both of which I fear will prove very costly, are not restricted to Ontario. Geddes Resources’ bold $500-million Windy Craggy project is a classic example of a great mineral deposit being paralyzed by a small group of rabid environmentalists. The way it looks today, it will take years (if ever) before it will get the green light. That’s something operators in places like Mexico, Chile or Peru don’t have to contend with.

But Windy Craggy’s obstacles are dwarfed by those faced by Hydro-Quebec’s $12.7-billion Great Whale hydroelectric undertaking, where a small group of Crees, along with a coalition of vociferous environmentalists, are unquestionably retarding that province’s economic growth, literally holding millions of Quebecers up for ransom.

Perhaps it’s time for democracy to be redefined.