The mining industry needs "jealousy-inspiring profits" to attract investment, Australia's richest person Gina Rinehart said Thursday as she urged the country to stay competitive by lowering production costs.
Mining heiress Rinehart, who is also one of the world's richest women, wrote in a monthly article for the Australian Resources and Investment magazine that "investment is critical for Australia".
"Without jealousy-inspiring profits, investments of substance do not follow," she said.
Rinehart, who secured a US$7.2 billion funding package for her massive Roy Hill iron ore mine in Western Australia in March, said resources projects did not automatically become rivers of gold.
While people believed "once you have a tenement granted to you, all you do is sit back and wait as the money pours in from it", that was "far from the reality of things", she wrote.
A sharp rise in mining exports boosted Australia's economic growth to an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the first quarter of 2014, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed Wednesday.
But the surge in exports has also contributed to the recent slide in iron ore prices, with Australian producers saying it could lead them to cut spending.
Rinehart, the head of resources giant Hancock Prospecting, repeated her warning that Australia was becoming too expensive for multinational companies.
"Australian companies cannot succeed in the world markets where we compete against lower-cost commodities from lower-cost countries," she wrote.
"We need to see costs decrease in Australia in order to remain cost-competitive if we wish to see the goose continue to lay its golden eggs."
Rinehart, whose fortune was valued by Forbes magazine in March to be US$17.7 billion, is known as being outspoken.
In 2012 she compared the cost of doing business in Australia with workers in Africa who were "willing to work for less than $2 per day".