Speaking at the Paydirt Africa Down Under conference in Perth, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Dennis Richardson said the number of Australian mining firms listed on the stock exchange and operating in Africa had jumped from 54 in 2003 to more than 160 this year.

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The Department of Minerals and Energy has said it will issue new prospecting licences within six months of application, and mining ones within one year, and the pace has accelerated in recent months.

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His first job after law school was in the legal department at Amax, then one of the world's biggest mining companies.

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He decided to segregate 1 million acres of federal lands in Arizona while the Department evaluates whether new mining claims should be allowed on these lands.

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Rather, they were marketing managers and other business executives, eager to circumvent the ever-so-slow IT department and have complete control of new applications, especially the new data mining tools that allowed them to gain new insights from the big data explosion of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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