Why Australia's gold towns could turn into ghost towns

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

The town's resident population has declined by about a tenth over the past decade to just under 30,000, but housing is scarce, with much of it taken up to accommodate FIFO workers.
A recent application by gold miner Northern Star, which owns the mammoth open-cut mine that looms over the town, to build an 800-bed workers camp for staff working on a mill upgrade, was met with concerted local opposition.
The project was approved by council in a three-two vote, despite 144 out of 148 submissions by members of the public opposed to the application.
The vast majority were concerned FIFO accommodation resulted in a lack of connection and contribution to the local community. The workers would not support local businesses, they feared.
'Get people to come and live here instead of FIFO. Get the population up, instead of down, otherwise Kalgoorlie will be a ghost town. Is that what we really want?' one submission asked.
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The assessing officer noted Northern Star had proposed operating a daily shuttle bus transporting workers to and from the local shops to improve social and economic connections to the town.
'Our priority is always around residential workforce,' Northern Star chief executive Stuart Tonkin told reporters during a visit to the Kalgoorlie Super Pit site.
But the reality was the resident workforce could not support construction and other short-term jobs on its own, he said.
'We are filling up local facilities and hotels and utilising local places, as well as those temporary camps.'
Local businessman Murray Leahy fought tooth and nail to avoid using FIFO workers for his Kalgoorlie-based mining services company MLG OZ.
But as the business took off, he hit a crossroads: bring in employees from out of town or stop growing.
'We started putting people in houses, and we established a structure whereby we'd fly you in and out for six months and if you wanted to transition your family in, we would pay for you and your family to move to Kalgoorlie,' he said.
'We would provide a house for you free of charge for six months and after that you could salary-sacrifice it, so we were transitioning people from being flyers into being residents.
'Then we ran out of houses to do that with and the market became so strained that we had to stop that program.'
Leahy said ideally all the company's 450-odd workforce would be full-time residents, but he was still relying on 200 or so FIFO workers.
There was a desire among workers to join the community.
About 14 of MLG's FIFO employees were looking to move their families to live in Kalgoorlie residentially but simply could not find a house, he said.
'Fundamentally, the issue that the Goldfields community has stems purely from the fact that we have had very poor state and local government planning over a long period of time,' Leahy said.
The state has been 'immensely slow' in releasing land to alleviate the situation, while provision of water and power to enable development has also been lagging.
The current council was working hard to try and rectify the issues, 'but they are dealing with a 15-year legacy here of poor planning and poor management'.
'To effectively make the change that's needed, it's 100 per cent reliant upon our state releasing land and key services to be able to drive development.'
The government was investing significantly in the Goldfields region, said WA Mining Minister David Michael.
The WA budget included $16.8 million in funding to boost development-ready land in Kalgoorlie.
Planning was also under way to redevelop Kalgoorlie Health Campus, the state developer was selling houses at its Karlkurla estate project for as low as $205,000, and a new $150 million vanadium flow battery was being installed to secure Kalgoorlie's energy supply.
'Government agencies are also working together, and with industry, to ensure there is sufficient land for housing across our state,' Michael said.
'Land and housing development in the regions is constrained by contractor availability, infrastructure capacity and upgrade timing constraints, native title and higher development costs.'
Ballard Mining chairman Simon Lill said he would like to see the government provide more tax incentives for living in Kalgoorlie long term.
'I would love to, and I think Northern Star would love to, see more people in Kalgoorlie. And Lynus would love to see more people in Kalgoorlie. But in the current FIFO world, I'm not sure I can see that happening,' he said.
'Can they make life in Kalgoorlie tax-free for a period or no stamp duty on houses or something like that?
'It is sad to walk down the main street and see so many of the shops boarded up.'
Leahy also called for a more generous regional zone tax offset to incentivise people to live there permanently.
Kalgoorlie residents can claim $57 off their tax through the scheme.
Michael said Kalgoorlie residents could already access generous stamp duty concessions, which the government expanded in the recent budget, and complemented other incentives like low-deposit loans for modular homes.