Should the Top End revive traditional mining towns?

It was largely unknown, more than 600 kilometres east of a major shopping centre, and severed by a great hunk of steel down its beachfront.

Yet when Cheryl Bell and her mining worker husband moved to isolated Alyangula in the 1980s, they also found an island community geared around fishing clubs, family picnic days and sports carnivals.

"I go for a walk every morning without fail [around Alyangula] and back then I used to know every face that I saw along the way," Ms Bell said.

"These days, I only know a third."

It is an anecdotal microcosm of a trend that has swept across Australia and the world, replacing remote tightknit towns of mining families with transient workforces of drive-in or fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) workers.

This month the long-term trend towards FIFO at Alyangula's main employer, the GEMCO manganese mine, and the closure of its recreational club led unionists to call for caps of the employment of FIFO workers.

Photo: The Alyangula Recreational Club closed in early 2017, with its director blaming changes in the town's demographics. (Supplied: ARC)

"It's about the fall back onto the local community," Josh Burling, the local organiser of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), said.

"The school, the pool, services that the mine does help with while they have their residential people there."

Yet some experts say a golden era is clearly over.

The rise and fall of NT mining towns

Today, Alyangula is one of the Top End's last surviving mining towns, yet 50 years ago building communities around commodities was a global phenomenon.

Photo: The first shipment of manganese left Groote Eylandt more than 50 years ago. (Supplied: BHP Review 1966)

"It was about building the mine and the town at the same time," NT economist Rolf Gerritsen explained.

"In the old days, flying was very expensive, it wasn't really an option for moving large numbers of people regularly, so the mining companies would locate their workers as close to their work as they could."

In the Territory, Professor Gerritsen identified four major mining towns built during this boom era: Nhulunbuy, Jabiru, the Tennant Creek satellite town of Warrego, and Alyangula.

Each hinged on a different commodity yet followed a similar blueprint.

Most were excised out of remote and sparsely populated traditional lands, leading to royalties for First Nations people, yet the majority hired by the mines were newly arrived non-Indigenous workers.

Bringing in these hundreds or even thousands of skilled workers and their families meant the creation of parallel streets, neatly spaced homes, health clinics, schools, supermarkets and everything else.

"The mining company would have to build swimming pools, tennis courts, squash courts, and it's just very expensive to maintain these facilities," Professor Gerritsen said.

He argued the pitfalls of maintaining towns, increasingly volatile economic conditions and the growing affordability of long-distance travel made FIFO models increasingly attractive to mining companies.

Infographic: Share of the population engaged in long-distance commuting. (Supplied)

In Australia, a swirl of government policies also changed the playing field.

The ongoing centralisation of services by state governments has taken doctors through to teachers away from the remote regions, making them less attractive to people who might want to move there for work.

Companies have also lost tax exemptions that previously encouraged them to build communities, while the fringe benefits tax (FBT) has led to sizeable incentives for employers with FIFO-style employees.

FIFO in the Northern Territory today

Today, it is estimated 7,000 people from places like Cairns and Perth work FIFO jobs in the NT, with notable employers including Borroloola's McArthur River mine and Darwin's offshore INPEX gas project.

Professor Gerritsen said the Territory's population was still too tiny to sustain these types of large-scale projects without bringing in interstate workers.

He also argued that people today were less willing than those 40 years ago to relocate more permanently to regions like the Gulf of Carpentaria.

"They'd prefer to be in Perth every Friday night having a beer and hopefully pulling a chick."

He said other incentives for FIFO workers included the obvious big bucks salaries and not being tied to a town that could be struck by market volatility, as happened to Nhulunbuy in 2013 when 1,000 jobs were axed by Rio Tinto.

"You always hear the stories of the failures of FIFO, not the stories of those who've done their four years and paid off their house," he said.

Yet not everybody agrees with these views.

A 2013 federal committee report into the impacts of FIFO — Cancer of the bush, or salvation for our cities? — identified many now well-known social issues for FIFO workers putting in long hours, far away from home and loved ones.

"I would call FIFO a family destroyer," the CFMEU's NT and Queensland secretary Michael Ravbar said.

"What I'm seeing in other parts of Australia is the total reverse [to the Northern Territory]. Governments are actually getting involved because they want to keep the jobs in their local communities and support local business.

"When workers are allowed the choice, you'd be surprised how many want to live in these communities, contribute, participate.

"To me there is no real choice today for workers. It's a sham."

Just this month research was published that backs up this claim; it found workers were more likely to choose residential contracts over FIFO work in communities with services to support them.

Photo: An empty mining worker house in Nhulunbuy in the wake of the alumina refinery curtailment. (Supplied: Lynne Walker)

This is something hinted at by Ms Bell when considering the transient faces on her morning walks, the loss of other mining families as they go FIFO, and the dwindling list of things to do in isolated Alyangula.

"I've been here for a long time and it's sad to say that myself and my partner have sat down in the last six months and discussed what to do and not do," she said.

"We would like to stay for another couple of years, but the thing is there is, in a lot of ways, really not a lot left here."

Modern-day model 'conspires against the north'

Professor Gerritsen did agree with the unions on the downsides for regional development.

"From the point of mining companies, FIFO is great because it puts all the downside risks onto local communities," he said.

"The main beneficiary of large-scale mining is the company tax receipt of the Commonwealth. For local government, it just adds to service demands that are unpredictable and hard to plan.

"State government will get some economic activities that will feed development in the short-term.

"Take the example of Borroloola. The company plays the good citizen and donates $20,000 to this Aboriginal group [but] it really has not made much impact [economically].

"The retired fishermen who live in King Ash Bay have made a bigger contribution to the local region's economic development than the mining company has."

In this way, Professor Gerritsen concluded that today's reality "conspires against the north", adding that large-scale mining or infrastructure projects alone would never truly develop the north.

"This is not just a problem for mining companies using FIFO, it's also a consideration for the development of large-scale tourism projects," he said.

What happens after mining?

Tradies no longer earning mega mining bucks may not earn too much sympathy, but they're part of a bigger story: what happens after the mining and construction booms?

Yet when asked if there was a better reality, he replied that he did not see the Territory ever going back to the era of raising mining towns from the dust.

Even the CFMEU's Mr Ravbar agreed FIFO was probably the only realistic way to develop new infrastructure in undeveloped regions, however he argued that existing towns like Alyangula still needed support to encourage residential workers.

The 2013 committee report into FIFO recommended a swathe of changes, such as reforming tax incentives for miners to employ FIFO workers.

Few recommendations have been implemented at state or federal levels.

"I think FIFO will be around for quite some time to come," Professor Gerritsen said.