Last week in Kalgoorlie Labor’s shadow minister for mining Joel Fitzgibbon and the local candidate Kevin Richards again said a Latham labor government would work with the industry and other stakeholders to develop a workable flow-through share scheme.

The announcement said the scheme would be appropriately targeted at small and independent exploration companies and “not open to abuse”.

Fitzgibbon told EnergyReview.net that details of the scheme would be provided before the next Federal election.

Today’s announcement said that discovering new deposits was crucial to the sustainability of the resource sector and that a failure to do so would lead to massive job losses in regional communities.

Exploration expenditure has been on a steady decline for much of the last decade, though improved commodity prices and the consequent return of investors to the sector suggests the trend has been turned around in more recent times.