Content Warning: Injury and Death in Mines.
I was scrolling on Facebook when I heard of Eli Kelly’s death.
Eli and I attended the same high school in Tamworth, NSW. He was a familiar face: only two years older than me, and I had spoken to him once or twice. The article stated that he had been working as a ‘fly-in fly-out’ (FIFO) subcontractor in a gold mine near Kalgoorlie, when he tragically suffered fatal injuries on site. As I refreshed the post, condolences flowed in from people Eli and I grew up with, but also from many names I didn’t recognise. One comment in particular stood out to me, with a woman named Nikki Hogan commenting: “Another one! Same mine site that took my brother [Terry Hogan] less than two years ago.”
This was sobering to read. Were Eli and Terry’s deaths untimely accidents, or could they have been prevented somehow? To disprove my suspicions, I set out to investigate what I thought was a spate of disconnected workplace accidents and fatalities in Western Australian mines. What I uncovered was a web of workplace safety issues rooted in the systemic failure of a resources industry that many consider to be among the world’s best regulated.
Before we jump to that conclusion, we should start at the birthplace of these tragedies. The gold mine, called St Ives, spans over 75,000 hectares and consists of both underground and pit operations. It has around 1,600 reported staff, 80% of whom are contractors and subcontractors. It sits in the deposit-rich Eastern Goldfields Region, where the first commercial operation began in the 1980s. The Western Mining Company owned St Ives until it was acquired by Gold Fields in 2001. Gold Fields now owns and continues to operate four mines in Australia, the largest and most valuable being St Ives, where close to 400,000 ounces of gold are reportedly mined annually.
While the accidents at St Ives were horrible surprises, could they have been feasibly prevented? When dealing with an industry as large and as inherently dangerous as mining, is it fair to assume that regardless of the level of safety, there will always be unpreventable deaths? Current legislation and research in risk management distinguishes between “principal hazards” and “one-off events” when it comes to answering questions like these. David Cliff, a professor in Occupational Health and Safety in Mining at the University of Queensland, makes the case that the vast majority of fatalities within the last ten years have been due to one-off events. In differentiating between the two terms, Cliff claims that principal hazards are multi-casualty incidents typically involving large-scale failures in mine operations, such as the 1994 Moura coal mine explosion. Conversely, one-off events like vehicle failure are typically more random and cause individual fatalities or injuries.
Contrary to the grim picture painted so far, Cliff argues that since 2003, most major principal hazards in mining have either been eliminated or wholly reduced through effective risk management and training, now accounting for less than 20% of total accidents within Australian mines. Data from Safe Work Australia seems to agree with this. The fatality rate in WA mines has dropped significantly, from 12 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2003 to 3.4 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2013. However, Cliff holds that this positive trajectory has not been maintained since. He argues that one-offs are mostly to blame for the spate of recent tragedies. Evidence shows that accidents in this category such as crushes and falls are not only failing to decrease in incidence, but contributing more to total causes of deaths each year. Given the seemingly sporadic nature of one-off events, Cliff contends that most standards designed to reduce principal risks have been ineffective at curtailing them. Instead, they continue to persist as evolving puzzles for regulators to crack.
In spite of the odds that we may never see Australian mining become a zero-casualty industry, Cliff remains convinced that it is fruitful to reform current OHS protocol to combat the rise in one-offs. He cites some change in the form of Rio Tinto’s critical control management model, which according to Cliff seeks to “identify a small number of vital controls… and directs resources towards rigorously designing, implementing and maintaining them.” He claims that while progress with such programs may be possible, it will likely be unstable long-term given systemic factors that the mining industry is reluctant or unable to change. For example, the Queensland resource industry’s latest ‘Safety Reset’ report found little positive change in overall OHS levels across the five years it was conducted, despite the implementation of initiatives similar to the ones Cliff mentions. Programs like these offer very little hope of enacting meaningful change to Australian — especially Western Australian — mining. When the number of annual fatalities for 2023 matched those from ten years prior, how can we say any effective solution exists?
Other researchers in the field challenge the attention Cliff places onto the kind of risk that occurred as a contributing factor to these deaths. They claim that a more insidious cause may be more responsible. In an extensive literature review published in 2024, Doctor Heather Jackson and Professor Emeritus Michael Quinlan conclude that the Australian mining industry’s overreliance on contractors and subcontractors has exacerbated poor worker well-being in mines. This has led to their overrepresentation in deaths and serious injuries, a figure reconfirmed in a 2024 annual report by Gold Fields. Their argument challenges the view that one-offs are random events with little in common with each other, by proposing that a pattern emerges when we better examine who is involved in these accidents rather than the type of accident that occurred. Speaking to ABC News, Quinlan revealed that four of the five mining deaths reported in the Eastern Goldfields and Pilbara regions since 2022 were contractors. To add to this, just days after Terry Hogan’s tragic death at St Ives, there was another death in a gold mine near Newman, with both occurring less than 18 months prior to Eli’s death, and all of them being subcontractors.
It’s important to note that the Australian resource industry’s need for contractors (in all forms) is part of a broader trend in neoliberal economies worldwide. For corporations like Gold Fields, a significant part of having an effective business model and maximising profits involves routine cost-cutting of internal expenses, independent of whether the market is in downturn or upturn. But after significant downturns, what follows is especially aggressive cost-cutting. Following the end of the 2013 Australian mining boom, the mining sector saw this play out, leading to drastic labour shortages as recorded in a 2019 study. Jackson and Quinlan note that after these shortages, contractors capitalised on the demand for increasingly cheaper labour by cutting costs within their own businesses in order to make their services more competitive to hiring operators, resulting in a workplace that employs fewer permanent employees and more contractors. The Financial Times reported that while the global workforce for mining giants like Rio Tinto, BHP, and Anglo-American fell by a third between 2013 and 2018, the percentage of contractors actually increased. In fact, switching to external contractors is such an effective cost-cutting measure that it saved an average of 14% in operating costs for 10 mining firms according to an Australian case study from 2004.
The literature review identifies several reasons why an overreliance on contractors has led to declining well-being within Australian mines. The first of which, the authors claim, is their exploitation by bosses. Given the precarity of their working arrangement, a 2022 thesis analysed in the review claims that FIFO and drive-in drive-out workers are made to do more “dirty work” in unsafe conditions. Due to their perceived inferiority within the workplace hierarchy, contractors are less likely to raise concerns and halt dangerous work early for fear of not being promoted and receiving better pay in a more permanent job if they do. In an interview for Honi Soit, Quinlan revealed that the combination of stressful workplace and employment conditions, alongside long stints away from home, made for the perfect storm for worsening mental health.
Jackson and Quinlan also claim that cost-cutting measures within contracting companies force them to implement cheaper and less stringent training and OHS protocols. A 2022 case study surveying 2009 workers in the resource sector found that this led to a mediocre perception of the effectiveness of OHS regulations meant to protect them. Contrary to what mining corporations claim, the expertise they chase when hiring specialised contracting agencies does not necessarily translate to expertise in safety or risk communication. Widespread cost-cutting measures hit even the most specialised contractors hard, according to Quinlan and a cross-sectional study conducted by Valluru et al. The literature review points out that many accidents involving subcontractors are overrepresented in routine repair and maintenance tasks. While proper auditing would be expected given the heightened danger found within such areas, cost-cutting stemming from a push for austerity has led to risks in these areas being inadequately controlled for some time.
Contracting has also been shown to weaken the power of unions in mines, even though unionised mines have been shown to be substantially safer. Quinlan told me that by relying on a large semi-permanent workforce, mining firms effectively eliminate the conditions required for strong unions to form, with the unions persisting in these sites often lacking major bargaining power. For example, following news of Terry Hogan’s death in early 2022, Australian Workers Union representatives claim they were prevented from entering the mine to assist Gold Fields with initial investigations, even though entry was legal. The West Australian reported that the union was required to file for a special entry under the Industrial Relations Act to be granted access into the mine by operators. Similarly, The Financial Times said that it was not uncommon practice in Queensland jurisdictions for lawyers hired by mining corporations to be first on-site following an accident, despite outcry from unions that the concerns of workers weren’t being adequately addressed when done so. Ray Parkin, former chairman of the Queensland Mines Rescue Service, claimed that legal interference “lock[ed]-up” vital information from unions, leading to slower and less transparent investigations.
But where does this leave us with practical solutions? Legal reform may work in the meantime, with the recent Work Health and Safety Act implementing the harshest penalties for industrial manslaughter in WA’s recent history. Reforms like this have allowed WorkSafe WA to successfully prosecute two contracting agencies and one mine operator for separate instances of negligence and failure to create reasonable health and safety standards in 2022. While punitive legislation in this area has shown some promise, the Australian mining industry has otherwise opposed laws codifying ‘same work same pay’ principles which would ensure that all workers are paid the same for identical work in the mines. Concluding their review, Jackson and Quinlan recommend a significant reduction in the use of contractors, most notably in the areas of routine maintenance and production.
Wherever these proposals take us, we should keep Eli and the many others at the forefront of our minds. Change can only happen when we remember who we are changing for: the lives that have been lost, and the many lives that are at stake.
If you or a loved one are experiencing distress please contact the resources below:
Lifeline: 13 11 14
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636
Griefline: 1300 845 745
Financial Resources:
Legal and Financial Support: 1300 888 529
The Australian Workers’ Union: 1300 040 482
