With the enquiry about FIFO workers arrangements causing havoc in mining towns, the towns have to accept the brunt of the blame as it was the town folk, investors and businesses alike who drove these mining companies to do what they have done and it was simply caused through greed.

When a motel in a sleepy town that rented for $38 a night, became $150, simply because of the mining boom, or a house's rent went from $100 to $1500 or more, or the local fuel station put their fuel up 10 to 15 cents per litre or the local engineering shop increased their charge out rate from $60/ hr to $130, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

Greed can be a terrible motivator and these greedy owners of houses
And businesses have learned the hard way that for every action there is a reaction.

I don't feel the slightest bit sorry for them.

Rehctub, I don't know if you have ever lived in any outback/remote towns, whether mining towns or not?

I have lived in several places in rural WA and the NT over the years and they were all very expensive places to live in. Everything used by the people living there had to be trucked in from thousands of miles away, and in the wet/cyclone seasons, it had to be flown in.

Naturally, this lead to high prices for food, groceries and building materials, whether they were mining towns or not.
To attract and retain workers, even the health department had to pay big wages, but we used all that just to live up there!

Suze, with due respect, the Bowen Basin, where the equiery is centered, is not a remote location so I can't agree with your assertion that all mining towns were expensive places to live pre mining boom of late.

As for my personal experience I've recently returned from Miles where I cut and sold my own timber to the mining industry as well as working in waste management in the region.

Food prices were actually quite reasonable as we had an IGA and a Foodworks, so they kept each other honest. The puns and clubs however were a different story as a counter meal which cost $15 in 2005, went to $35 in 2013, the peak of the CSG program.

But it's the motels and support industries like automotive and engineering shops that hurt the locals the most. Of cause their rents became unaffordable as well.

In 2004, when I bought my land, a town block, fully serviced sold for $7,500 (no, not $75,000) and a house and land sold for $85K. Or you could rentmone for $120 per week.

In 2013 the land cost $220,000, the house $500,000 and it rented for $1200-$1500 per week.

Greed saw the miners build camps to house their FIFO workers and there are now approx 300 empty homes in Chincilla and about 150 in Mikes, some have never been lived in. Rents are now as low as $275 per week.

One word, GREED!

Yes Rehctub, I saw exactly the same thing happen in Gladstone, first with the Alumina plant, then the power house, port expansion for coal export, & now the gas port terminal.

A couple of friends, Gladstone locals, built a couple of rental houses there, when it was still a small sleepy country town, & rode through the booms. They saw their house values vary by as much as 30% in a year, & had periods of high rent, & periods of long vacancies, as the booms came & went.

My friends got sick of the roller coaster ride of boom & bust, & moved to somewhere more stable. The whole feeling of the place had changed. From sleepy hollow, where you knew everyone to a bustling small city, with regularly changing floating population.

I spent a couple of cyclone seasons moored in the creek by the yacht club. Living on the boat I could not detect any cost of living change, but the welcome mat, so friendly extended to me on my first visit, had been disappeared, & visiting yachtsmen were ignored, in later times.

The Gladstone people had not asked for this, the change was imposed on them, & many did not like it. Many did, with more better paying jobs, & opportunities for the kids, no longer forced to move to the city to find work.

Yes some responses to a boom can be ugly, but then some of workers it brings, can be far from pleasant in the town.