Friday
The attack (behind paywall) on The Perth Mint reads like a hit job.
Is a baker supposed to know, and morally approve of, the source of the flour that he makes his bread with?
Further, I have just received The Perth Mint’s response (below) and it appears that the majority of the article, if not all of it, is at best an exaggeration and at worst a misrepresentation.
Is it by a journalist with a beef against the artisanal Gold mining families of PNG? Those people are already literally scratching a living. It certainly won’t help them.
From an old PNG hand: “The fact is you cannot change PNG by going after and embarrassing The Perth Mint. The Perth Mint has no leverage to make wholesale changes to the way things work in PNG. What it will do is drive the artisanal gold into the open arms of the Chinese, thereby removing a channel for communication with players in PNG and removing the possibility of changing things slowly.”
The Chinese have a colonial mindset and fall far short of having the best interests of their employees in mind.
I will be interested to see if there are further attacks in a similar vein on miners, refiners and/or minters around the world. I doubt that it is part of a coordinated attack on the industry as a whole – a general besmirching of gold – but it is possible.
Who knows in what direction the Dervishes of the giddy PC movement will Whirl next?
Far more likely is that it is just a ‘journalist’ attempting to make a name for himself? If that is all it boils down to, then he’s succeeded; the name is Dick Head.