Company boards should be held responsible for mine safety.

That comes from Professor Michael Quinlan from the University of New South Wales who has conducted audits of the Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania and has prepared government reports on mine safety following the the Pike River disaster in New Zealand, amongst others.

Professor Quinlan recently published a paper written conjointly with Dr Heather Jackson from University of Newcastle titled ‘Contract labour in mining and occupational health and safety: A critical review.’

The paper was prepared after the spate of recent death and serious injury on Queensland and West Australian mine sites, Professor Quinlan said.

He’s placed the responsibility at the feet of boards running companies which operate on mine sites.

“Boards make decisions that affect safety,” Professor Quinlan said. “Unfortunately few boards have a safety specialist director, even in high hazard industries like mining, where you’d expect they would. 

“Now, there are exceptions, and I know some of them, they’re excellent people, but they’re very much the exception. 

“So part of the problem here is getting that information which the safety people know up to the people that are making the decisions. 

“It’s not the safety people that are deciding to use more contractors, it’s the boards. And in practice they hold no responsibility because as far as I’m aware, no board of a large company has ever been prosecuted for safety breaches.”

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

“The industry has always had contractors and there are positions where contractors are entirely appropriate, but contractors were moving into too many different areas and it was creating too much disorganisation. 

“And 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. “

Not enough had been done to arrest the increase of fatality and serious injury, he said.

“Given the recent run of fatalities and injury in WA and in Queensland, if not elsewhere in Australia, we were concerned to look at the contractor issue because there’s been a growing use of contractors irrespective of this evidence. 

“And at the same time, while companies were saying that they were moving towards zero harm, well, there seems to be a bit of an inconsistency with the evidence.”

In Queensland, A 51-year-old man died in a maintenance accident above ground at Oaky North mine site early this month. In August, a 48-year-old man was killed in a crane roll over. Three weeks later a 56-year-old man died in a vehicle accident. Both happened on the QCoal-owned Byerwen mine site.

A 17-year-old man died after suffering significant crush injuries on the Saraji mine in January.