What are the differences between the United States and Australia in terms of exploitation and utilisation of our rare earth resources?

Okay, that’s a great question. Um, to date, we, that is to say Australia does a very limited amount of consumption of rare earth’s in final product and we do a very limited amount of processing. There are some product plants that are operating to produce the valuable material um, dysprosium and terbium out of the Northern Territory and at Northern minerals uh but, but these are small tonnages, okay? So there’s, there’s very limited primary production of concentrate. That will change because Lynus plans to bring their present processing onshore. So, if you think about the parts of the cycle we are in, Lynus is a very important producer of neodymium, praseodymium rich concentrate that’s mostly sold to Japan. And with, with the output from Lynus uh, presently they do their processing in Malaysia but as I mentioned they’re bringing some of that onshore in Australia. Uh, they pretty much supply uh almost all of Japan’s needs, yeah? So you may recall, you know in the two thousand and ten period there was a big kerfuffle because like China had blocked rare earth exports to Japan and it all went crazy. And then WTO stepped in and that all got resolved. But Japan, still, for reasons of having been burned in that experience seeks to import from other sources than China. Um and so they, they get a bulk of their material from Lynus and, and that’s why they helped fund it. But the Japanese demand for this material, for magnets which is the valuable thing, is pretty much saturated. There is, there is to all intents and purposes zero, I’ll repeat that, zero demand in the U.S. because they don’t actually really make magnets. They’re trying to change that situation but one aspect of the geopolitics which is not widely discussed is that the technologies for producing these magnets are under patent and let’s remember the magnets primarily go into things like electric vehicles and elevators and all that stuff. So they’re using electric motors um for high efficiency um and high talk. Uh, so, so the United States used to produce a version of the magnet which is called a bonded magnet and there’s another version called a centred magnet. And bonded magnets are a bit easier to produce but they don’t have as high a performance as centred magnets and the origin story of this is back in the nineteen eighties uh there was a cobalt crisis in uh Africa that meant cobalt prices went very high. Uh and as a result, uh, what happened was the U.S. defence and the U.S. car industry, general motors among them, started looking for replacements for what’s called a samarium cobalt magnet which was used a lot in automatic windows and the like in vehicles. Um and that’s when they discovered these high-performance neodymium ferro boron magnets. So the reason for that ancient history was Sumitomo metals in Japan or their predecessor discovered the centred magnet and at about the same time, the general motors people discovered the bonded magnet. And it turned out the centred magnet was better than the bonded magnet but they did a patent swap. For a while that all went cool uh but in the mid-nineties, the U.S. effectively exited the bonded magnet market uh for various reasons um and the Japanese continued to dominate the centred magnet market and all the patents wound up, or most of the patents wound up with a firm that’s now called Hitachi metals in Japan and they have been successfully able to prosecute intellectual property cases to defend their patent portfolio. So you’re not able to export a high-performance centred neodymium ferro boron magnet outside of China uh to anywhere else in the world unless you have Hitachi metals patent’s or equivalent with cross licensing. And that’s why there’s no magnets in the U.S.

Lynus have recently signed an agreement with the us defence to build a rare earth plant in the us, what’s going on there?

Well the significance of that is that the, the, the output of that plant, ‘cause remember I told you the story about the F thirty fives and, yeah, well, you gotta have them right but I mean don’t bust a gut building a mine to satisfy that market. It’s fifty tonnes total. Um, so this, this uh, this particular facility will, will satisfy and saturate demand in that market

How’s progress going with that project?

Look, pretty good, that should be fine um Linus has an excellent partner in a firm called Blue Circle which is able to do separation um and the capitol cost of this plant will be minimal. It’s thirty to sixty million dollars. There have been some erroneous numbers bounding around in the press that say it’s a billion plus opportunity, it’s not. It’s the plant costs thirty to sixty million dollars um and the um, the, the amount of material produced will be high value material but probably not more than a few thousand tonnes at tops.

Will the Australian government be able to get details on that project?

I think most of its public um, in the sense that uh Linus and Blue Circle um have published um, you know, their, their descriptions of what it is that they’re doing and frankly that’s really the only thing that potentially is sensitive? Of course the U.S. department of defence is never gonna tell anybody where the stuff goes um but the U.S. department of defence um, you know, I mean they have a clear interest in this whole area but, but they’re not a significant source of demand, they’ll make a lot of noise but, but they’re not gonna sign any cheques. So um, well, I should qualify that. They’re signing this cheque but, you know, the size of the cheque is only thirty million dollars and you’ve gotta set that against the seven hundred billion dollar, circa seven hundred billion dollar a year um above the line U.S. defence budget, right? Like ignoring whatever might be in, you know, the side pockets of security, right? Um, so, so you know that I think, I think you can tell from the colour of the money um how big the market is, not very. [LAUGHS]

It looks like there’s a race to catch up to china. Do we expect to see deals done between Australia and the us to catch up with china?

Let me answer that carefully and express a view that’s my opinion, alright? Um, so this is clearly an opinion um because you’ll find a great variety of, of such opinions. My opinion works from an understanding of the supply chain that I mentioned. So the key critical fact to me is that if you look at the tonnage of high-performance magnets and remember that’s the bulk of the market. So I’m thinking like a business person here, I’m not thinking like a defence analyst and that’s guiding my opinion though the bulk of the market in dollars is about ninety per cent of all magnets of various performance grades of this kind are made and manufactured in China. About seven per cent are made in Japan, about three per cent are made in Europe and about zero per cent are made in the United States, alright?  So… given that that’s the fact and given that people in business who are being asked as private business people to build mines and operate plant, if it’s the intention of respective governments to do deals between each other at the government level and the demand in the U.S. is zero per cent, it’s very unlikely that any of those deals will be commercial deals. Because what’s happening here is a disconnect between the views and opinions of those who are involved in strategic analysis for defence purposes and the views and opinions of those who only get paid because they make a profit in their business. Which is very different from government. So all the people who are in business are going to do what they need to do to stay in business and all the people who are in the security complex are gonna do what they need to do to get grants to write reports. And there’s a, that’s the disconnect in my opinion. So to answer you very clearly, there will be a lot of talk about doing deals between the U.S. and Australia and I think they’ll amount to an entire bunch of nothing.

So you don’t see the west wanting to protect themselves against china’s dominance as a real threat, just political talk?

It’s a real threat but I don’t see that the politicians have anything approaching the degree of understanding to do what’s required to combat it because what they’re thinking is that it’s a raw materials problem and that China has a monopoly on the raw materials. China does not have a monopoly on the raw material. They’ve been perfectly willing to seed ninety-seven per cent market share in two thousand and ten of production of the raw material to sixty-two per cent market share with production of raw material. Because they know that ninety per cent of all processing happens under Chinese control and ninety-five per cent of all um magnet manufacturer. And remember I said there’s ninety per cent in China and there’s probably some, seven per cent in Japan. So Hitachi makes some of their magnets in, they’re backward integrated into China. So there’s all this political going on and meanwhile the Japanese are saying well it’s lower cost to produce magnets in China so why don’t we do that? And that’s exactly what they’re doing and Tesla um has their magnet production deals for their Chinese manufactured Tesla’s with two Chinese magnet manufacturers um and Volkswagen, and this is a different area of the whole critical mineral space but Volkswagen in the last couple of days would’ve seen the share price opt a lot. Um they, they fired um their South Korean battery makers and said we don’t wanna deal with you anymore because you’re a problem and they did a deal with Cattle which Is the leading Chinese battery manufacturer. So what I’m trying to say here is that in my opinion what’s happening is commerce is doing what commerce always does, it says well where are the dollars and where’s the expertise and where’s the market? And that’s China and the politicians are saying we don’t like that, we’d like to be able to have this different industry in a different place um but they never think commercially so they don’t understand U.S. doesn’t make any magnets and the U.S. can’t make any magnets without talking to Hitachi metals and getting a license and the U.S. could complain about Japan and say well that’s really unfair but it was the U.S. patent court that enabled Hitachi metals to extend their patent life beyond the original twenty years. So Hitachi bought a case in the U.S. courts and said we’ve made these changed to our formulations on our magnets and we’d like to extend the patents and the U.S. court said yes, we can see your case, that’s absolutely fine. Your patents are now extended. Um and so effectively the Japanese have blocked the U.S. from building magnet plants. Um –

Where is the west left if the rift between china and the west continues to widen?

Well, that’s really one for the politicians my view is that the reality is that if you don’t have the expertise to make the magnets then you can’t make the magnets. Um so if the people who do have the expertise to make the magnets um are making magnets and you want magnets then you have to talk to them about one or two possibilities. Either you buy their magnets or you talk to people who are not Chinese about developing expertise to make magnets. The, the discussion in political and particularly in strategic circles is almost never about the issue of learning how to make magnets. Uh, because it involves science and engineering and it involves significant investment in material sides and China has done that consistently for thirty Years. Um, they may have stolen some IP from people here and there but it’s a two-way street. They’ve invested extraordinary amounts of money in building world leading material science capabilities which involves lots of scientists and engineers. I was speaking to somebody who’d visited uh the plant up in uh inner Mongolia which is this sort of rare earth city and he visited their rare earth research institute up there and they had a thousand PHD’s working contemporaneously on new applications of rare earths. We probably have five.

So are government grants to help miners superfluous?

I would say, only to be a little, little careful in my choice of words here. Um, I don’t think superfluous is the right word because the miners themselves do have good assets, right? Um, yeah, they would figure prominently in any China free if you will or China parallel supply chain. Let’s use that term. It’s neutral. So if you’re tryna build parallel supply chains for security reasons or just because you’re interested in the economic opportunity, I mean that’s a good enough reason then you’re gonna need the whole, elements of the whole supply chain from mine to magnet. So that, I think the grants to, to miners are not superfluous at all. They, they’re about the sort of investment China made over many years. To give you an example – sorry?

Will the grants make a significant difference?

Well, most of those grants that are on offer are not to run the mine per se, they’re to do RMD related to process technology and that is important so um, um I can’t give the numbers, you’d need to speak to management because I don’t want to mis-state their position uh but I can speak qualitatively. So for example um, you know, northern minerals has worked closely with the Australian nuclear science technology organisation over the years to develop their processing as have um, uh, what was formally uh an asset in the hands of Alkane is now with Australian strategic materials and that’s all very important. To give an example, Australian strategic materials has done partnerships and, and uh now equity owns um a Korean subsidiary which is a metallurgy company and… yes they are that’s right.

And, and their technology is world leading, right? So obviously it, it came from Korea but this is an example of a, I think what you’re asking is why do governments that are not Chinese collaborate to get somewhere and what’s noteworthy here is that this is not a U.S. Australian collaboration. It’s an Australian Korean South Korean collaboration. And what’s, just as a, a remark as an observer, what I would say is that because of the, the five eyes security arrangement between Australia, the U.S. Canada and so on um, it’s been my observation that a lot of commentary out of governments and also out of the security agencies has been around the importance of U.S. Australian collaboration and reverence.

Um, if I was looking for a collaboration between Australia and another country, the U.S. would be absolutely last on the list. Um, they don’t have the expertise. They used to have the expertise but they don’t have it anymore. Um and they’re, you know they, as i’ve said there’s zero per cent of the magnet market. You’d be much better off talking to a company in, that has a European heritage like Vacuumschmelze which is actually owned by a, a U.S. private equity firm but which has excellent operations for manufacture in both Europe and in Finland. So, you know, if you’re actually trying to come up with a sensible policy, you wouldn’t be talking to the U.S. or you talk to them to keep them happy ‘cause they’re important but you wouldn’t bother spending much time on it ‘cause they don’t actually do anything. You’d be talking to people who do things and that’ll be Japan, it would be South Korea and it would be Germany and Finland and Norway and France and a whole bunch of the others that actually know what they’re doing.

What policy support does the Australian government give the rare earth manufacturers and miners?

They provide a number of different policy support elements and I would defer to the government releases from the critical minerals facilitation office to get the detail on that because, you know I don’t think it’s my job to summarise all kinds of support that they, they provide. Um, but it – yeah no it’s substantial. The reason i’m, I’m saying that is that, I’m not being cute, I’m just saying that they just released um a major initiative of support involving grants running to a billion dollar pool um and, and so it’s changed quite a bit recently and I’m not, I’m not close to exactly where that money’s gonna go and the reason is that um, from what I do know about the government’s support is that the government previously did not have in place programs to make direct grants to mining companies, they were able to provide finance of the debt nature in the capital states through things like export credit agencies and the northest uh the northern Australia infrastructure fund um and uh, oh god there’s a, there’s a bunch of these things. Um as were other foreign governments but you know, the idea that you would help for example Northern Minerals uh get into production for heavy rare earths, the, the prospect of them getting like a direct grant to do that um, was off the table when I was having discussions last year.

Australia is basically saying we don’t want anyone collaborating with china where it may impact our military operations. we’d be stuffed if china took the same stance

Oh one hundred per cent. I don’t think it’s a sensible policy.

Why not?

I think it’s a nutty policy because of what you said, you’re absolutely right um, uh if the Chinese decided to put a moratorium on the export of high performance neodymium ferro boron magnets uh it would be good for Japan [LAUGHS] because they can produce them but it would be bad for everybody else because Japan pretty much has their foot on the patents so what I’m saying is the price of those magnets would go through the roof um, um and, and you know if you think about it in purely commercial terms, the Japanese might say oh bring it on, that’s a good outcome. [LAUGHS]

The policies miss where the action is

It does. It does.

What’s happened between rareex and shenge?

Commercial terms and conditions of business would suggest to me as an investor that if I was in the position of rare earths I would do exactly the same thing and to put it in context, MP materials, which is the restart of the monocorp mine in the United States so just [for your benefit if you’re not familiar with it, there’s a mine in the United States called Mountain Pass which used to be the predominant source of rare earths up until the early eighties, early to mid-eighties when China took over. Well started to take over. Um and the, that Mountain Pass mine um, it’s on the border between Nevada and California um and it’s been shut down in the past uh, for various reasons having to do with the U.S. being sometimes a hostile mining jurisdiction and also low prices. Um so the U.S. mining industry has been occasionally on life support and, you know, to make it personal, you know, I was an investor in monocorp and uh, you won’t be surprised to hear I lost a hundred per cent of my capitol in that particular investment. Um, because it went under after the last rare earth boom and the reason it went under was because they couldn’t master processing to the standards and costs curve required to compete with Chinese. So the context here for Shenge is that when monocorp came out it went into receivership and the assets were up for sale, uh, you’ll remember the defence department in the United States is always blabbering about rare earths. There was only, there was, in the bankruptcy auction, nobody turned up in the United States. This, you’ve gotta remember this is the only really viable at scale mine in the U.S. In the bankruptcy auction nobody turned up. The people who I think were debt financiers to the company but if I remember correctly, then became the management of the company ‘cause they had to manage and work out. And the only investors they could find of scale to take on the process of, of restructuring the company and rehabilitating its mining operations were Chinese and Shenge was one of them. So Shenge merged with ten per cent of that company if my memory serves right and that’s what became MP materials which is just listed on the exchange in the United States. MP materials amid all this song dance in the United States, MP materials has nowhere in the United States to ship their material for processing into highly refined form. They do produce concentrate and that goes under an offtake agreement with Shanghai back to Shanghai’s processing facilities in China and outside China. So the only U.S. rare earth mine of scale presently ships it’s material to China.

What happens with the mou with rareex, do you expect intervention there?

I’ll express an opinion here, um, personally I think it should be allowed to go ahead and the reason I say that is that I don’t see any other party willing to stand up accommodation of capitol expertise and capacity to accept rare earths material. I see nobody. Um and you know, there are two objectives at war – one is the national security, the second one is economic prosperity and you can’t have national security without economic prosperity. If as a condition of national security you’re going to say to your rare earth miners thou shalt not be in business, um, then that’s not very good for economic prosperity um and if you don’t like the fact that the only way that they can get into business is to go do a deal with the likes of Shenge then you as the government needs to spend the money to fix the problem right? You need to actually extend a grant for a processing facility in Australia that means that companies, all companies have an alternative to Shenge. Otherwise you should just shut up right? You know if the government, you shouldn’t be making noise if you don’t have the ability to sign a cheque or the will to sign a cheque to provide an alternative. There’s no point saying well we, we like rare earths and it’s really important to national security but you can’t produce them. [LAUGHS]

It’s likely we’ll end up in the same situation as the belt and road initiative

Yeah no, I can’t speak to that because that’s, that’s above my pay scale as to what the government would do um but you know, obviously they have certain powers um, I just point out that, that you know, [SIGHS] there might be many avenues so to say to stop rare earths from doing what I think is a sensible commercial deal um but of course, delivery against that commercial deal requires them to ship material across a border um and you know, the government has limited powers to stop that but they can declare certain things as export controlled um and they’d have to add concentrates for rare earths to that because rare [ex?] Can’t produce the refined product so you know, they’d be shipping some form of concentrate um and they’d have to do something like that um about that, if they were to do that, I don’t think that’s a very [LAUGHS] good idea. I think that all that that would achieve is a capitol drought for developing Australian rare earth endowment. I think we just see foreign investment disappear.

They’re risking cutting off their noses to spite their faces?

Uh, that’s my personal opinion. And so I think that that’s a hazard and again, I’d speak to the countervailing interests, right? So of course national security’s important but so is economic prosperity. I’m not sure that you achieve your national security objective uh by undermining your trade relationship with your biggest trade partner. Um, that’s my personal view um because and I’m happy to say this on the record um, I personally think that, and I used to work as a defence scientist many years ago so, it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with the considerations. I personally think that the most productive way to conduct a national security initiative in respect of china is not to say China is the enemy but to develop your military and intelligence capabilities to a point where whoever was, you know, your foe, you are highly confident that you can defeat their purpose, right? And that means you invest in, in the relevant areas that the military and intelligence and you let everybody else get on with their life. Um, that’s my view but you know, clearly that view is not current right now and I think that may be because I personally don’t think there’s a good understanding at this time in, in the public discussion, both here in Australia and also in the United States that whilst the U.S. is a great and powerful country and we love ‘em to bits and they’re very good in technology, they have for many years been backpedalling on the sharp end of let’s say physical technologies to do with manufacturing material science, uh all that stuff. The U.S. for sound reasons of pursuit of profit margin and opportunity has chosen to move deeply into services and software and all these sort of, shall we say digital or ethereal things that don’t require you to bother with anything physical in the world and um…

Do you need a government that is willing to invest in order to progress?

I think that’s a fair line of thought so just to amplify that, um, we have for a long time in Western nations appreciated the research and development is to many extent, many, in many ways a public good. What I mean by that is, if there’s a scientist or engineer any way who -anywhere who figures out how to do something in a new and better way, they can pursue patent protections up to a point but basic knowledge in basic science is not subject to patent protection, right? So it’s a public good and therefore, you know, private enterprise realises that and uh they say well why would I fund those guys at Stanford or the ANU or University of Melbourne or wherever um, why would I do that when they’re gonna tell me what they’ve found out anyway. [LAUGHS] And that’s the basic thing so, so, if you think about that fact, right, then you can look at a place like China and say oh they’re terrible because they are State controlled and whatever but around this issue of science and engineering, most of that is done in the public sector anyway, right? Most of it’s done in the public sector in Australia and most of it’s done in the public sector in China. Um, and one thing that’s true about science and engineering is that you can, you can make the case for democracy and we should all have a committee to decide what we wanna do or, you know, dare I say, the authoritarian situation that used to apply in bell labs where the leader of bell labs said I’m going to spend a million dollars on figuring out how to make transistors, right? Um, and, and the thing is that when, when you have sufficient funding directed in science and engineering you can achieve quantum leaps in capability and the Chinese have consistently invested um you know, for good or bad um in those science and engineering areas and you could see that with their own domestic space program. You know, we could say to the Chinese oh we don’t like the fact that you do things in a different way and we certainly don’t like the fact that you’ve set up these camps in Xinjiang and all that stuff. Um and therefore we’re not, you can’t have any of our things um. But to give an example, the Chinese space program, you know, they, they just landed probes on the moon and mars and all this other stuff um and the thing is that within the Chinese space program, they have been prohibited from buying U.S. componentry since two thousand you know? So you’re pretty heroic if you think the nation of one plus a billion people and, you know for whatever the quality of their education system, they’re human beings like anywhere else. They can read an engineering book. If you think you’re gonna stop them from achieving some form of parody by having a trade war? I think you’re smoking it. [LAUGHS]

What do you know about the makutu project?

I was just speaking yesterday for the first time to Tim Harrison about ionic resources um and I you know, I, because you know I’m an investor I need to disclose I, I don’t need presently own a position in ionic or rare earths. I have owned positions in ASM, I don’t presently own it and that’s not to be interpreted as a positive or a negative, it’s just a fact. Um, Ionic I think is an interesting project I had a good discussion with Tim yesterday for the first-time um, you will understand the main areas that we discussed were uh, how ionic viewed the challenge of uh producing uh heavy rare earths through heat bleaching from what is inherently a low-grade resource, therefore requiring very huge movements of material. Right, so you’ve basically gotta mine a whole lotta ground to get a very little bit of material. Um and so our discussions were about, you know, Ionics plans to um, pursue appropriate pilot plant experimentation to ensure that they could remediate the, the land that they were mining in a continuous process. I think that something like that is probably required to secure investor confidence in this ESG world, um, and on a preliminary discussion, I don’t see any fundamental reason why Ionic would not be able to achieve that other than the realities scientifically that they will discover by trying it in pilot.

Is the Australian Government involved in the project?

Uh no, they’re not and um uh, again i’ve got to use my words carefully here. To the extent that I know how the Australian government thinks about these things, it’s my received impression that the Australian government prefers to focus on mineral assets within Australia , and therefore doesn’t have any strong interest, shall I say that, shall I use that term. Doesn’t have any strong interest in what happens with what may ultimately be traced back to an Australian corporate entity in a different place so, so the practical examples of that would be obviously ionic as you mentioned, um, and, and Greenland resources which also has a deal I think from memory with Shenge.

They’re here, they’re everywhere. And as I, as I spoke to Jeremy um, from Rarex yesterday  ‘cause I was at a, a conference, a digital conference and you know I won’t say anything that was private or in confidence, but you know the thing about Shenge is that there is a perception – and this relates to what you were saying about the geopolitics. There’s a perception that comes out of places like United States that you know, it’s China inc. Right? Um, so it’s all these state owned enterprises and if you look at the org chart it all goes back to Xi Jinping. So what Xi Jinping says goes, right? Whereas i’ve been an investor in Chinese companies over the years and I think the biggest challenge in China, is for anybody in China who wanted to control China, to figure out what the hell is going on in China. Um, because it’s a big place and they have a long tradition of, I don’t the actual accurate quotation of the proverb but, you know, with that dynastic heritage, um, there’s, there’s a kind of saying to the effect that um, the emperor needs to know what the emperor needs to know within the purview of what the emperor can see, right? What the emperor cannot [see, the emperor does not need to know, right? Um, which pretty much sums it up, right? So Shenge seems to be a, a non-state-owned enterprise that on my reading of what they do, I would suggest that they are, in the much the same way as one might uncharitably say that Australian companies that do deals with Chinese companies are trying to escape uh the influence of the Australian government within our shores. I would say that the partners that they deal with in China are trying to escape the influence of the Chinese government within their shores and that’s why you’ll find both of them wind up in Singapore where the Singapore government will say we’re interested in trade so as long as you obey the law, you can do what you want.

I’ve read discussion about possible involvement of the U.S. and Japanese governments, has that come to pass?

It may do, I mean, the thing about the ionic material, it’s early days but it assays well for heavy rare earths as I’m sure you will have seen. Sorry that, so that’s the strategically important stuff and I would think that um, the U.S. might do that but getting back to that comparison between state owned activity and private activity, I think the U.S. is too disorganised to ever figure out that it wouldn’t cost them much money to do something there. Um, whereas I think the Japanese are organised so I would suggest that if anyone’s gonna do it, it’s probably gonna be the Japanese but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the party that comes in [LAUGHS] and actually does it is from South Korea.

The deal’s not done yet though is it?

No, no, and that’s not done it’s well, that’s my knowledge. I mean I don’t have any inside knowledge of course but, but my awareness is that, you know, ionic is still very much an early-stage project um and um before, it’s typically the case that before anyone does any off takes um… the, there needs to be significant um, you know, feasibility study and engineering work to establish that production is even possible. Um. But and then you need to, as you know, you need to go through, particularly in this space you need to go through a proving face where you know, you can, you can demonstrate that your material will be consistent and meet spec so if we take the example put aside ionic for a moment, if you take the example of Northern minerals which has that dysprosium rich material, it’s too sub script that they have the off take agreement with and you know, whist the government’s running around like a mad hen going it’s terrible that Rarex is signing deals. So… you know, it’s all gonna go back to China. And, it’s like I said with the Volkswagen CEO, Volkswagen came out and said look we’ve had it with the South Koreans, they’re always bickering and fighting with each other and they don’t give us time and bandwidth and runway so they’re sacked. Um, and we’re going with Cattle in China. And that’s our military strategy. Um and that’s the commerce speaking, right? You know that I think we’re entering a decade where, where the sorts of questions you’re asking will be the grist for the mill. [LAUGHS]

Is there any interest in Myanmar?

Ah there’s enormous interest in Myanmar because people are trying to understand what is actually happening in Myanmar and not only the political unrest um, there’s a, there’s a fellow, I don’t know him personally but Kingsnorth is the surname Donald? I can’t remember his first name um but he was involved with the Lynus at a very early stage and but he’s no longer with the company and hasn’t been with them for a long time but he’s published extensively on the so-called, their legal mining issue in China and there are different theories around the quantity of material that comes out from Myanmar so some people will tell you oh, you know, all these tonnes are coming out of Myanmar are actually coming out of the Chinese provinces, the ionic clay and they’ve just been uh transhipped across the border and reshipped the other way to sanitize the fact that it’s an illegal trade. So there are some people that say that um, and there other people that say um, oh bollocks to that, um, you know, Myanmar might be uh, you know, a bit of a weird place but there’s no fundamental reason why they couldn’t have their own ionic clay resourced in Myanmar. Um, and you know, your guess is as good as mine as to what the truth is ‘cause I don’t get out much these days and um I think the only way you’ll answer a question like that is to go send a bunch of spies into Myanmar. [LAUGHS]

Would they be interested in playing in that space if things settle down?

Oh, well look you know I think Australians are pretty entrepreneurial so if you, you said if things settle down, if things settle down I’m sure that if there was a commercial opportunity, there’d be some company that was willing to look at it um realistically they might be in the private space rather than public just because as you know, everyone’s very ESG sensitive and there are so many different, shall I say, there are so many different potential negative headlines coming out of any association with Myanmar, I think most companies would just go, not on the list um uh, for example, you know as well as I do, there’s tonnes of copper in the DRC but they’re are in Africa. But there are relatively few mining companies who, who will say we’re going to do a new project, not a legacy project, we’re going to do a new project in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Thank You.