Granted first ever right to hire foreign workers Friday. Saturday shuns 14,000 locals queuing at jobs expo

Unemployment benefit lines are getting shorter

The Australian reports almost 14,000 people looking for work queued for 50 minutes just to get into the Australian Mines and Metals Association’s jobs expo in Perth over the weekend only to find the developers of the first project in the country to be granted “unprecedented access to foreign workers was not there to greet them.”

Australia’s government announced Friday it will allow the $9.3 billion Roy Hill iron ore mining project to hire about 1,700 foreign workers, as MINING.com reported. They will be hired under the first Enterprise Migration Agreement (EMA) to alleviate a labour shortage said the threatening the country’s resource-led boom.

Roy Hill is part-owned by the country’s richest person and number four on the list of the world of mining’s billionaires Gina Rinehart and her company Hancock Prospecting was absent from the fair and so were the project’s main contractors including WorleyParsons, Clough, John Holland and Multiplex says AMMA.

MINING.com published in January an article about the reasons why mining professionals should take the mining jobs boom in Down Under with pinch of salt.

Click here before you jump on the next plane headed for the Antipodes.

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