IMO as a metallurgist, spending time reprocessing the tailings...

IMO as a metallurgist, spending time reprocessing the tailings is eminently sensible. Historically, the processing plant has leaked gold at an alarming rate and the recoveries appear to have been poor. It makes no sense to me to pour high grade feed into the plant, knowing that a significant proportion of the (presumably finer) gold is headed straight for the tailings stockpile. Far better that the leakage is plugged first so that when the high grade feed is introduced the recoveries and hence the production will be significantly better.

Testwork has shown that CIL/CIP is needed to recover that proportion of the gold that is unliberated, so for now there will continue to be losses of that material, but I support the concept of optimizing the performance of the existing gravity plant to maximize recovery of free gold before running further high grade ore.