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The mining industry has claimed it can buck the trend of artificial intelligence sparking a jobs bloodbath and instead create an employment boom, slashing years off approval wait times for major developments in the process.
The Minerals Council of Australia will ask for $13 million in the May federal budget to pilot AI, which it believes will provide a billion-dollar benefit to the economy in the long run by improving regulatory decision-making.
Around 26,000 homes across the country are caught in an approvals backlog, while the peak body for the nation’s miners estimates $51 billion in resources projects are stuck in the pipeline each year due to slow decision-making processes.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable said application wait times could be halved by using AI to sift through “thousands of pages of approvals”.
“It takes about 3.8 years to get the statutory approval time met, that’s up from 2.3 years in 2019 – an increase of 60 per cent,” Constable told this masthead.
“We think that can be paired right back with the use of AI. The endgame is faster approvals.
“It takes about 16 years to get an idea off the ground to a final decision made and construction occurring with a project.
“You want to make sure that every part of the process is as efficient as you can so that a project proponent, an investor, can make a decision that puts Australia first.
“We’re in a major competition with the rest of the world and we want Australia first.”
Approval application delays have long been a source of frustration for industry.
Last year, Woodside’s application to extend the life of the North West Gas Shelf in WA until 2070 was approved by the federal government – the oil and gas giant first made the application in 2018.
Emerging from its economic roundtable last August, the federal government said it would cut red tape and speed up delays by implementing reforms, including two areas that could be acted on immediately.
An AI pilot was among those reforms.
This masthead understands the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has undertaken preparatory work for a pilot, but no operational tools have been deployed at this stage.
Housing was to be a primary beneficiary from deploying AI.
Liberal-aligned think tank, the Menzies Research Centre, said the government would not meet housing needs without adopting the technology, and would miss the opportunity to lower energy prices with approximately 5000 kilometres of transmission lines waiting to be built.
“The risk is that Australia will miss out on a lot of this investment that’s funding these major projects because we’ve got one of the more lengthy approval time processes in Australia,” executive director David Hughes said.
“We’re talking about big new electricity transmission lines that can help lower power prices and we’re also talking about 26,000 new homes which are currently part of this backlog. The government really needs to take action now.”
Shadow Housing Minister Andrew Bragg promised to “hold the government’s feet to the fire”, for what the opposition said was a failure to fix approval times through environmental reforms.
“What we want to see going forward is the use of technology to approve applications because it’s ridiculous that it takes years, sometimes decades, to get approvals under this federal planning rule,” Bragg said.
“In fact, the department says that there are at least 10,000 waiting to be approved because a parrot flew over a block of land in 1971,” he added facetiously.
“Albo and his environment minister [Murray Watt] haven’t pulled their fingers out.”
The artificial intelligence disruption has pushed software companies to make massive job cuts, headlined by Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Atlassian slashing 1600 jobs.
The Minerals Council of Australia believes the use of AI would instead lead to more jobs in the sector by fast-tracking major developments.
“There is about $140 billion worth of critical minerals ready to take out of the ground by 2040, so that’s a huge opportunity,” Constable said.
“Delays in approval processes are a handbrake on the economy, creating severe bottlenecks for job-creating developments. [Faster approvals] means that we get more jobs occurring all the way around Australia.
The Minerals Council has promised if Treasurer Jim Chalmers granted its funding request for an AI pilot, the final decision of any development application would rest with a human, a stance backed by the Menzies Research Centre.
“I think Australians are concerned about the potential of AI taking their jobs, but what we shouldn’t be concerned about is using these technologies to help us do our jobs better and faster,” Hughes said.
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