Jayden Ellis, Chair, AQA.
Sorry if you missed QuarryNZ – it was a heck of a conference.
We are using this edition of Aggregate News to give you some insights; for those who did attend, it will provide a reminder of some of the key takeaways.
I was pleased to kick off the conference with my report on the AQA’s activities for the past year.
That included working through a change of Government with the opportunity to revise policy settings that have long beset our industry. I acknowledged the extra effort our CEO, Wayne Scott and the small AQA team have put in to ensure our new political leaders are fully aware of the changes required so we can provide them with the quarry resources needed for their infrastructure, roading and housing objectives. Both the Resources Minister Shane Jones and Infrastructure and RMA Reform Parliamentary Under-Secretary Simon Court addressed our conference; a further signal perhaps that our industry’s importance is finally being recognised.
I finished my address by hoisting a kilogram jar of aggregate and suggesting we all get one and wave it in front of anyone complaining about your quarry. We each effectively use one kilogram an hour in building our homes, communities and country.
Using this line can supplement the earlier metric the AQA used – that the cost of aggregate doubles after the first 30km it travels (thus proximate quarries are required in the area the aggregate is needed).
A confirmation that this message has been received came when Rotorua’s young Mayor Tania Tapsell used it in her address to the conference. As you’ll see in our story on page 43, she had nothing but praise for our sector. I wish we could clone her and install her in mayoral chambers around the country.
Mind you, the first of our two keynote speakers, AI guru Justin Flitter, showed how AI is now creating anyone you want. Fancy a chat with Marilyn Monroe?
More importantly, he’s advising us in the quarry sector to get all of our staff on board with AI technology. There are already autonomous machines operating in US quarries and given the rapid advance of this technology, they will soon be here. Half of New Zealand businesses are now using AI. Justin’s message was that it’s not going to take a lot of jobs but it will take over many tasks (see page 42).
Our other conference keynote was Australia’s Jodi Goodall who gave a presentation complete with clips and photos from a US rock festival which turned into a riot. Her message was that the festival was a failure of leadership and that disastrous consequences can happen in a quarry if leaders don’t set the right example (see story page 41).
That provided major food for thought as did the Infrastructure Commission/GNS Science presentation on their just released quarry opportunity modelling report (see story page 44). We learned other regions are starting to ask for such modelling. Has your region done so?
I’m also still distilling some of the welter of technical information imparted at conference, some of which our Technical Adviser Mike Chilton reports on in page 45.
All in all, we had more to absorb in Rotorua than you could shake a stick at. Find a jar of aggregate and start shaking that instead.
