The Australian Mining Review

South32 (ASX: S32) has reported solid operating and financial performance for Q3 FY26, maintaining production guidance across all operations except Australia Manganese.   The company delivered net cash generation of US$121m despite weather disruptions and continued investment in growth. South32 chief executive Graham Kerr said several operations delivered strong results during the quarter, supported by higher aluminium prices, record year-to-date production at Brazil Alumina, and a record US$135 million distribution from Sierra Gorda. Group alumina production increased by 1% year to date, while aluminium production was broadly unchanged, with Hillside Aluminium continuing to test maximum technical capacity. At Australia Manganese, however, FY26 production guidance was revised down 6% to 3,000kwmt, reflecting elevated site water levels, wet season rainfall and impacts from Tropical Cyclone Narelle. South32 said strong operating performance and commodity price support helped offset US$158m in growth capital expenditure at the Hermosa project during the quarter, with the company’s balance sheet supporting ongoing investment in copper, zinc and silver growth. At Hermosa, South32 reported progress in federal permitting under the FAST-41 process, alongside continued advancement of underground and surface infrastructure at the Taylor zinc-lead-silver project. Cannington remained on track to meet production guidance despite significant flooding in northwest Queensland, while Sierra Gorda maintained guidance despite wet weather impacts in Chile.  South32 also highlighted potential costs pressures linked to higher freight rates, raw material prices and stronger producer currencies, while noting measures have been implemented to mitigate supply chain risks associated with conflict in the Middle East. Following the quarter, the company paid a fully franked interim dividend of US$175m, while continuing its capital management program 

A new report commissioned by the Mineral Councils of Australia (MCA) Victoria has found that lifting Victoria’s gold production to 1mozpa by 2035 could support more than 10,000 jobs across mining and related services.  The industry body is now calling for policy settings to support a new wave of mine development and exploration.  “Despite the increased price of gold in recent years, production has fallen from its 2021 peak, reinforcing the need for better policies to encourage mining investment and exploration – converting advanced gold projects into new mines,” the MCA Victoria said. “Tripling gold production would also quadruple gold royalties to $188mpa to fund vital services and infrastructure across the state.  “In this context, the Victorian Government should support new mines and increased production, because royalties on increased production will deliver significantly more for all Victorians – especially if a share of royalties is allocated to regions where mines are located. “All parties contesting this year’s Victorian state election should commit to more efficient permitting processes, bringing more royalties back to local communities, investing in geoscience education and incentivising exploration and processing to make the most of Victoria’s mineral endowment and ensure workers share the benefits.” Regional Victoria is identified as a key beneficiary, with existing gold operations in Bendigo, Ballarat and Stawell, alongside prospective developments in Maldon, Kilmore and the Loddon Shire. The report notes Victoria’s historic status as a major gold province and says modern mining practices present an opportunity to expand gold production, provided exploration access, investment setting and permitting processes support development. 

Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO) will donate $1.5m to the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) to support communities impacted by Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle.The donation will help establish a recovery and resilience fund that will be administered by the DFES. The fund will support clean-up and rebuilding, restoration of essential services, assistance for households and small businesses and initiatives that strengthen preparedness ahead of future cyclones.WA Emergency Services Minister Paul Papalia comments on the initiative.“WA is no stranger to severe weather, and Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle is a reminder of how important it is that we are prepared and able to respond quickly when communities are impacted,” he said.“This contribution will help strengthen the state’s ability to prepare for future events. I thank Rio Tinto for stepping up and backing Western Australians and our emergency services.”Rio Tinto iron ore chief executive Matthew Holcz says the company’s focus is on helping affected communities access support and strengthening their ability to recover from future events.“The Department of Fire and Emergency Services and other frontline organisations play a critical role in keeping Western Australians safe, and we are proud to support their work alongside the many volunteers and agencies helping people through this recovery,” he said.“We extend our thoughts to everyone impacted, and we thank the emergency services personnel and community groups who have worked tirelessly to respond. We hope this support helps communities rebuild and move forward.”In addition, Rio Tinto employees can support recovery efforts through the company’s employee giving program, RioGivers, where matched giving helps amplify the impact of individual donations to communities affected by Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle.

The WA Government has allocated $30m to expand a fee waiver initiative that will support Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia and Covalent Lithium.The initiative will offer a waiver on government fees and charges for the companies until December 31, 2027.WA Mines and Petroleum Minister David Michael says Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia and Covalent Lithium have a vitally important role to play in critical minerals processing in WA and are a key component of the EV battery supply chain.“The Government believes it is crucial to support these two strategically important businesses while they battle with volatile commodity prices amid a period of rising costs; that’s why we decided to extend the crucial fee waiver initiative,” he said.“This initiative provides support ahead of the introduction of the Critical Minerals Production Tax Incentive, which provides a 10% rebate on processing costs and comes into effect on July 1, 2027.”The WA Government will also commit $5m in funding to develop standards for the reuse of lithium by-product in construction materials, aimed at reducing disposal costs.This follows the WA Government’s announcement earlier this month of a $15m allocation for interest-free loans to help WA’s nickel miners still in operation and support the potential restart of idled mines and ramp-up of new projects.

We could have been sitting on the banks of the Euphrates eating figs. That is, until someone got the bright idea to maximise shareholder returns. Now, we sit in web browsers making wagers as to when exactly the current round of bloodshed in nearby waters will come to an end.The stock market has long drawn criticism from those on the outside who view it as an economic machine ruled by investor sentiment and untethered to everyday life. Guy Debord offers us a critique of this estrangement in his The Society of the Spectacle. Debord posits that “the society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, but fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.”Yet one could still argue that the stock market is not pure spectacle. However distorted it becomes, it still retains a material tether. Well-functioning secondary markets help capital flow toward productive uses and are only made possible by real people spending real dollars. However imperfect, the market is still connected to its people.Enter, prediction markets. While the stock market still attempts, or appears, to serve production, prediction markets don’t even bother, instead monetising anticipation itself.If you have managed to remain blissfully unaware, prediction markets allow users to trade on the likelihood of future events. Bets on the platform range from issues like Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April? What will Trump say in April? Will the US confirm that aliens exist by…?The object of exchange is the event itself as a probability. It’s a market solely concerned with hype, or as Polymarket would call it, wisdom.Polymarket Note on Middle East Markets: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today.I first heard of prediction markets when US Rep. Ilhan Omar was attacked during a town hall meeting. Online, people were betting on the substance that was sprayed on her. Now, traders bet on missile strikes in Iran and insults flying out of Trump’s mouth.Proponents of prediction markets argue that they aggregate dispersed information into forecasts about uncertain future events. Even where they are reasonably accurate, what they trade is not an enterprise producing goods or services, but an anticipated outcome.Unsurprisingly, prediction markets have begun to elicit bouts of paranoia. For the market, insider trading and corruption are major concerns. For me, the concern is the grotesque estrangement of real people from tragedy as we load currency onto spectacle with little concern for impact. On Polymarket, crises are no longer lived realities; they are odds to watch and positions to take.Proponents of prediction markets argue that a major benefit could be derived in the form of an aggregated universal truth. By engaging individuals across the world from different stations, beliefs and backgrounds, diverse and dispersed information is synthesised, and users are delivered a supposedly more accurate probability for any given situation. Rather than relying on news sources, investors, politicians or other figureheads, a broader swath of public opinion is accounted for, adding more data and insight to the probability equation.Polymarket Note on Middle East Markets continued: After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realised that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.This, however, relies on incentivised truth-telling. Prediction markets hope that because individuals are financially motivated, they will place bets that align with their true beliefs. But conflating belief with truth does not produce accuracy. According to Polymarket, there is a 4% chance Jesus Christ will return before 2027.But it looks like prediction markets will miss their chance to disperse those fears, as they have already been undermined by corruption.US-based trading app Robinhood has reportedly begun excluding some prediction market contracts, with Robinhood UK president Jordan Sinclair saying the company is “very focused on market abuse, insider trading”.Remember when Trump issued his warning on Truth Social that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”? If I had taken a temperature check of public opinion at that moment, I would say the majority thought we were inching towards a point of no return rather than a ceasefire. There was even a countdown.And yet, just before the ceasefire was announced, newly created Polymarket accounts made highly specific bets on the outcome, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits. The Associated Press reported that at least 50 wallets placed substantial bets before Trump announced the ceasefire, and that these were the first bets made by those wallets.This isn’t confined to Washington, either. In February, two Israelis were charged over alleged bets placed using classified military information, and later that month, Kalshi accused a MrBeast video editor of insider trading on markets tied to the YouTuber.The impacts aren’t only reactive, either. In March, a Times of Israel reporter said Polymarket users sent him death threats and pressured him to amend his report on a missile strike near Jerusalem which became central to a wager on the site.Beyond investor corruption, the real scandal of prediction markets is not just that they let people bet on the future, but that they sit within a culture that monetises crisis while moralising individual behaviour. A culture that turns public life into persona, sentiment and price. Governments increasingly redirect attention from corporate and structural responsibility to everyday conduct. Individuals are named and shamed for using plastic straws, eating meat, driving to work or consuming too much, while billion-dollar industries burn through fuel at scales beyond personal comparison.Last week, the Federal Government was in the hot seat over its ‘Every little bit helps’ campaign, a fuel-saving advertising push costing up to $20m and encouraging Australians to use less fuel where possible. Some cried out that it was like plastic straws all over again. But the idea was still valid: individual consumption of our resources is a beast worth taming or at least keeping an eye on.But the question remains: what about the industries using billions of litres of fuel each year? What about inadequate public transport systems that make commuting to low-paid office jobs inseparable from car dependence? What about the fact that the government, which wants us to believe its hands are tied, is one of the few actors with any meaningful power over the fuel crisis, and at least some responsibility for it?The problem is not that individual restraint is meaningless. It is that personal consumption is positioned as the moral centre of crisis management, while the larger systems shaping the crisis remains immune to scrutiny. Disjointed public transport, corporate fuel dependence and state policy failures do not disappear just because individuals are told to tighten their belts.At the pump or on Polymarket, we grasp at paper straws, hoping to grab a bit of control over our circumstances. The ugliness of this system is not only that tragedy can be watched and traded at a distance, but that responsibility for fixing the social breakdown behind conflict is then handed back to individuals as a series of choices. All the while, we are left completely disconnected from any real locus of control.Debord calls this the alienation of the spectator: the more you contemplate, the less you live. The estrangement is a surrender of our own lives. And when the stakes are high enough, it’s a surrender of our own humanity for the chance to make, or save, a quick buck.Luckily for those of us in Australia, prediction market platforms, much like single use plastic, are functionally banned.Off the Record is The Australian Mining Review’s weekly column. 

Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO) posted a 9% year-on-year increase in copper equivalent production and its second-highest Q1 Pilbara iron ore production since 2018, up 13% year-on-year.The miner said the quarter was impacted by two cyclones, while warning of growing uncertainty around supply chains and costs due to conflict in the Middle East.Rio Tinto recorded an 8mt impact to iron ore shipments from Tropical Cyclones Mitchell and Narelle and a .9mt impact to bauxite production from Cyclone Narelle.Rio Tinto chief executive Simon Trott comments on the Q1 results.“Operating excellence drove 9% YoY copper equivalent1 production growth across our portfolio as the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine continues to ramp up as planned and our integrated aluminium business, again, delivered a strong performance,” he said.“Our Pilbara iron ore mines performed strongly, while shipments were impacted by two cyclones in the quarter.“We achieved the historic land exchange at Resolution Copper, with our project team focused on unlocking the next phase of one of the world’s largest untapped copper deposits.“The unmatchable mix and scale of our portfolio has ensured growth and supply chain resilience against changing operating conditions as we continue to closely monitor the evolving situation in the Middle East.”Rio Tinto says the impacts of the Middle East conflict have been limited on the supply-side while commodity prices have responded favourably.Iron ore, copper and lithium operations remained largely unaffected.As for fuel, Rio says higher diesel prices steepened its cost curve while higher jet fuel prices did not disrupt the business.Fatal incidents at Simandou and Kennecott led to both operations shutting down during the quarter. The operations were progressively restarted once conditions allowed.“Safety is the foundation of our business,” Mr Trott said.“The tragic loss of two colleagues this year, at Simandou and Kennecott, is a stark reminder that we must ensure everyone goes home safely at the end of every shift.”A staged restart at the Kennecott underground project commenced April 16.