Mayoral Minute - September 2025

Published on 24 September 2025

I’m currently in Brisbane. I was invited by the LGAQ to the State of the State Address yesterday by Premier David Crisafulli.

It was a wonderful opportunity to be here. There were five other mayors invited at the same table, and it was good to get a shout-out by the Premier yesterday to myself and to Mount Isa and just him expressing his commitment to make sure that the smelter deal progresses and gets done.

And from all reports it looks like it should be finalised with the next couple of days. I know we’ve been hearing that for a long time now, but hopefully the end is near.

I also came down because I’ve got the opportunity to speak at the Society for Economic Geologists International Conference which is being held in Brisbane on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’ll be addressing that group on Friday evening.

What that is about is the benefits for regional communities from exploration and mining and what opportunities are going to happen in Mount Isa in the future.

I’ll be discussing the critical minerals research facility and also the benefits CopperString will bring to the area in terms of providing cheaper energy and providing a spine for renewable projects.

The Meeting of the Mines in Cloncurry was also a really great conference that a number of the Councillors, the Deputy Mayor and CEO and I attended a couple of weeks ago.

The key message from that was looking at the economics around enabling infrastructure – that it needs to be looked at through a different lens, about what royalties can be unlocked, rather than looking at it as a user-pays and “covers the return on investment” model.

The point was made that if projects were assessed in this way, a lot more would stack up and we could see a lot more of that enabling infrastructure that’s required for our economic development for Mount Isa itself and the whole North West Minerals Province.