PAUL MCBETH: A little ore conversation

Paul McBeth is the editor of The Bottom Line and Curious News, and previously worked at BusinessDesk for 15 years.

New Zealand has a vexed relationship with mining.

Go back 15 years, and somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 Kiwis marched up Auckland’s Queen Street sending a message loud and clear to then-energy minister Gerry Brownlee – keep your mitts off digging up conservation land, which the John Key-led government duly did by backing away from giving sexy coal the glad eye.

The needless death of 29 miners at the Pike River coal mine later that year prompted an overhaul of lax workplace safety regulations and entrenched a scepticism in the public’s consciousness about the need for extractive industries in the 21^st Century.

Well, at least in the urban centres where those semi-annual trips to New Zealand’s glorious landscapes tap into our slightly dubious idea of the country being environmentally 100% pure.

The 2015 collapse of state-owned coalminer Solid Energy under the hubris of some pie-in-the-sky plans to become a national resources giant didn’t do the sector any favours, especially given it was predicated on an assumption that commodity prices only go up.

Luck has left me standing so tall

Of course, the shiny stuff runs deep through New Zealand’s veins, with the 1860s goldrush in Otago one of the key economic drivers of immigration after Britain deigned to give us limited self-government in 1854.

And it was the Blackball miners’ strike in 1908 that’s seen as the start of New Zealand’s labour movement, giving us the eight-hour workday we all know and love.

Probably best not to forget that Ngāi Tahu has guardianship of pounamu as the stone’s kaitiaki.

So it’s been interesting watching the local industry’s efforts to revive its reputation as a sector that delivers high-paying jobs in areas that need it.

As it stands, the sector is a shadow of the goldrush days when the precious metal accounted for more than half the nation’s exports, with mining accounting for about 1% of the economy in the March year and almost 3% of the workforce.

The man with the suit and the face

New Zealand First’s loquacious Shane Jones has been one of the sector’s most ardent flagbearers with his goal of more than doubling annual mining exports to $3 billion over the next decade.

That shift in the regulatory settings hasn’t gone unnoticed.

One of the recent listings on the NZX was by Australian miner Uvre – now called Minerals Exploration – whose chair Brett Mitchell pointed out that state governments across the ditch have slowed things down to the point where New Zealand’s regime is almost better and faster than even Western Australia.

Minerals Exploration has exploration and prospecting permits in Waitekauri and central Otago – near OceanaGold’s Waihi and Macraes mines respectively – and was the third would-be miner to join the NZX in the past year.

Santana Minerals was first out of the blocks last year and is on the fast-track for its proposed goldmine near Cromwell in Central Otago, while Manuka Resources snuck on in September, making it easier for local investors to get in behind the controversial offshore ironsands project overseen by its subsidiary Trans-Tasman Resources.

And last month, West Coast-based Tāiko Critical Minerals revealed its plans to list on the NZX in the new year, followed by a capital raising in the middle of 2026, having broadly won over the local community with its plans to almost micro-mine farmland flats, rehabilitating the land as it goes, in its hunt for garnet, ilmenite and zircon.

Something I could have learned

Winning that social licence is key to operating in the regions, with protecting the Westland petrel – from which the company’s taken its new name – a focus for Tāiko in the conditions put in place to secure consent and the backing of the community and Ngāti Waewae, the local hapu of Ngāi Tahu.

It probably didn’t hurt that it also brings more than 130 jobs, adding a little oomph to the wider Grey district with its population of about 14,600, most of whom are in Greymouth.

Santana is facing a lot of noise opposing its proposed mine, including from one of the region’s most favoured residents, actor Sam Neill.

Meanwhile, Manuka’s TTR had the misfortune of being a guinea pig in the poorly executed legislation governing New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone and raised the ire of local iwi, environmental groups and fishing interests in its bid to mine ironsands off the Taranaki bight.

Still, local retail investors have developed a taste for the new resources companies.

Sharesies users have been the biggest buyers of all three mining explorers, as well as minnow gold miner New Talisman Gold Mines.

I’m glad that you’re bound to return

The question now is whether the local institutional investors will be swayed given they haven’t shown much appetite for New Zealand miners in the past.

OceanaGold is a good example.

The gold miner quit its NZX listing at the end of 2016, citing its regulatory costs and saying local shareholders would probably benefit from concentrating liquidity on the ASX, before quitting Australia in 2022.

New Zealand remains its biggest source of gold from the burgeoning resource in Waihi and the Macraes mine in Otago, which was slated for closure a decade ago until they kept finding the shiny stuff.

But its Haile mine in South Carolina is its single biggest operation, and the Toronto-listed miner is now eyeing a secondary listing in New York next year after the 2025 gold boom has seen its share price surge almost 200% so far this year, after adjusting for a share consolidation in June, and following a 57% gain in 2024.

Always believing

A quick scan of its top 20 shareholders throws up familiar names like Vanguard, Blackrock, Invesco, along with resources specialists such as Switzerland’s Konwave, Baker Steel Capital and Franklin Resources, but nary a New Zealand firm is among them.

For all our wailing and gnashing of teeth about selling to foreign interests, we really do struggle to put our money to work at home, with both the big institutions and regular people scrolling on Sharesies preferring the steeper returns of the US.

Of course, investing in mining isn’t for the faint-hearted.

Over the past 15 years, OceanaGold’s share price has posted five double-digit declines, seven double-digit gains and two years – including this one – where it notched up a triple-digit surge.

If the junior miners coming to New Zealand are going to stay, they don’t just need to win over the local investment community – they need them to actually notice they exist.

Image from Leonie Clough on Unsplash.

This column has been updated to correct that OceanaGold's Haile mine is in South Carolina, not California.