The overuse of contractors is undermining safety standards in the industry.

The blunt assessment comes from University of New South Wales Emeritus Professor Michael Quinlan.

Professor Quinlan has a 20-year exposure to mining and has conducted audits of the Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania and has prepared government reports on mine safety following the Grosvenor mine explosion among others.

Main image: Grosvenor mine longwall. Five miners were badly injured in an explosion on Grosvenor Mine in 2020

Individual deaths had continued at the same rate and multiple fatalities had only been avoided by virtue of luck, better technology and better medical procedures, Professor Quinlan said.

Contractors who now made up more than 50 per cent of the workforce on Queensland mines were doing more routine tasks and were at greater risk, he said. 

“The industry always involved contractors and the are positions where contractors are entirely appropriate, but they were moving into too many different areas and it was creating too much disorganisation, the economic pressures and too much trouble on regulators. That’s why I used the 10 pathways model. 

“And the other model I developed, pressure disorganisation, and regulatory failure because they’re particularly applicable to these situations. 

“It’s always frustrating when you’ve been looking at the industry for 20 years and you find you have insights about how to prevent injuries and incidents and it doesn’t seem to affect practice.”

The industry needed to be strategic about the use of contractors, Professor Quinlan said.

“We need more effective regulatory interventions. We need to have more union involvement in the industry, which contracting, of course, is weakening. 

“So those sort of important safeguards that were built through the safety reps system have been undermined and we also need just more attention to more generally what we know kills and maims miners. 

“I think I have identified how and why miners die and so we need companies to treat those ideas seriously.”

Related: Applying Professor Quinlan’s “Ten Pathways to Death and Disaster” in WA Mines

He said root causes needed to be addressed.

“And they’re the same failures again and again and again. Failures in design, engineering and maintenance, warning signals that were ignored. 

“Failures in risk assessment, failures in systems, failures in auditing, economic compromises on safety, values in regulation, failure to listen to a warning, to concerns of supervisors or workers or others, consultants that come to the mine.

“Poor understandings and relationships between those who are at risk and those in control of risk and failures in emergency procedures.”

The mechanisation of mine sites had reduced the numbers of multiple fatalies but single incidents resulting in death were occurring at the same or higher rate, he said.

“We’ve made no progress with single fatalities in at least the last decade or the last 20 years. And the same causes apply to those single fatalities as applied to multiple fatalities. But they’re not being targeted. 

“I think contractors is one of the issues that’s undermining it. And the point is, the situation could actually be getting worse in Queensland.

“… So the idea that you simply remove people from the mine (through mechanisation) will make it safe. Well, that doesn’t work for the maintenance people who have to go down and do the maintenance work.”