Tonsley Park in Adelaide was once the home of a Mitsubishi car plant.

When the Japanese industrial giant stopped making cars there the SA government found itself with a huge problem. Car manufacturing had been one of the city's major industries and those jobs were disappearing.

It responded by turning the old car factory into an innovation hub.

From the mining point of view it put the state's core library there and even brought in mining heavyweight Terry Burgess to chair the Tonsley Innovation District Steering Committee.

It put a Flinders University campus and a TAFE college on the site too.

Burgess, who will be speaking at the Future of Mining Australia 2019 in Sydney, told Australia's Mining Monthly that there were now more people employed at the innovation centre than there had been during Mitsubishi's heyday.

However, he lamented the fact that METS businesses were very much in the minority on the site.

"As I know from my long career in mining, we want to be a fast second rather than a leader," Burgess said.

"It is a particularly conservative sector."

Burgess said he had seen sentiment around the mining industry change diametrically during his career.

"During the dot.com boom they thought we were fossils and dinosaurs but mining got through that okay," he said.

Although Burgess does believe there is a more concerning change coming.

"There seems to be a particularly negative view being taken on mining development," he said.

"You see it with Adani. You see it with the South Australian Liberal government turning around and putting a ban on fracking in certain parts of the state."

Burgess admits the negative sentiment towards mining is making it harder to attract METS players.

He pointed to the other industries such as renewable energy and health that were seen to be more innovative than mining.

Yet this is an industry that moves thousands of tonnes a day, processes even more challenging ores and continues to improve its environmental outcomes.

It is also an industry where people get to drive really large trucks and blow stuff up.

One area Tonsley is looking at is building on South Australia's copper bounty.
"We've had a number of initiatives around the copper strategy we've been running," Burgess said.

"Another thing we're trying to do is run workshops for small entrepreneurs on the mining space."

Burgess said new ways of doing things had to be developed.
He said the idea of getting three to four major companies operating around South Australia to talk about collaboration was not going to work.

The problem, as many METS companies have discovered, is that those big companies are either doing the sort of thing the METS player suggests or want to own it for themselves.

• Future of Mining Australia is on March 25 and 26 at the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth hotel. It features some of mining's thought leaders speaking on key issues affecting the industry now and into the future.