The Queensland state of Australia has created thousands of additional mining jobs in the last 12 months and is looking for men and women to fill hundreds more vacancies. Would it not be wonderful if South Africa’s Minerals Council could report the same thing?

South Africa, independent mining consultant and junior mining promoter Dr John Bristow notes, has every single mineral mentioned. “Just shows the difference that enabling investor-friendly policy makes,” he said – and the benefit of having a government – in this case a state government, or in South African terms, a provincial government – and a Geological Survey that make modern geological and geophysical data freely available to investors.

Investec Wealth & Investment chief economist and strategist Brian Kantor made the point in an article in Business Day last week that a thriving mining sector, more than any other sector, holds out the promise for growing incomes, provided it is given the opportunity.

Australian workforce data shows that, in the last 12 months, employment opportunities in nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying have soared 53%, jobs in coal mining have jumped 34%, jobs in the oil and gas have risen 25% and jobs in exploration and mining support services are up 7%.

Contrast that with the report that the employment complement of 150 South African alluvial diamond mining companies has plummeted to 5 000 from a prior 25 000.

Yet, South African Diamond Producers Organisation chairperson Gert van Niekerk is confident that the sector can prosper “if treated properly” by government.

Implementation of enabling mining policies is key to safeguarding the South African diamond industry from further decline and a worry- ing contraction – and ditto for the rest of the mining sector as well.

When government opens the way, as has happened for ASX- and JSE-listed Orion Minerals, there is the potential for Aladdin’s Caves to open up.

Orion’s high speed in Prieska, in the Northern Cape, is rapidly rekindling hopes of a wonderful zinc, copper, gold and silver revival in the area, once worked by current Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe himself.

Early comments of Orion CEO Errol Smart are very encouraging: “Now that we’ve drilled a much larger resource than what we expected to do when we first set out, we’re also looking to doing an upscale on the production scope to get an optimised net present value of the project.”

That raises high hopes for the reopening of the Prieska mine. In addition to resuming mining within existing already-paid-for infrastructure, Orion’s survey success in the surrounding countryside is encouraging.

Moving faster than any junior mining company has done in these parts for some time, Orion describes its drilling success to date as being “just phenomenal” and the work it has done so far with its high-powered SkyTEM exploration surveys as “lighting up like a Christmas tree for us”.

Clearly, the South African government needs to leverage this country’s wonderful mineral endowment and the rest will follow.