The operating problems boards and peers ask me about

Most of the bushfire risk a rural network creates comes from a small number of mechanisms: conductors clashing in wind, vegetation contact, failure of old poles, crossarms and insulators, and protection that re-energises a line onto a fault. I manage that risk in layers. Before summer we inspect and clear the spans with the highest consequence, ranked by a fire-spread model rather than by kilometre. On days rated Extreme or Catastrophic, feeders in high-risk areas run with automatic reclosing disabled and more sensitive earth-fault settings, which means more outages for customers and fewer chances of re-energising a line onto a fallen conductor. On Catastrophic days, 47 feeders may be de-energised under a rule we publish each September. Over the longer term we replace bare conductor with covered conductor or underground cable where the consequence justifies the cost, and we ask customers, through the regulatory process, whether they agree to pay for it. I work closely with the state's fire agencies, but decisions about our own network are ours, and I do not pretend otherwise.

A major storm on a rural network is a logistics problem disguised as an electrical one. Damage is spread across hundreds of kilometres, access is often blocked by fallen timber or floodwater, and the people who most need power back may be the least visible on a map. I organise restoration around a published order of priority: hazards to life first, then hospitals, water and sewage pumping, telecommunications and registered life-support customers, then the feeders that return the most customers per crew-hour, then isolated lines. We bring in crews from other networks under mutual-aid arrangements and send mobile generators to the towns that will wait longest. The discipline I have tried to add is honesty about time. In the first day of a large event we publish a damage-assessment status instead of an estimate, then publish restoration ranges by town at fixed hours, signed by the field managers who must meet them, and we report afterwards how many we met.

About 1,300 of the people working on our network at peak are contractors: vegetation crews, civil teams, pole inspectors and traffic controllers. Their injury rates were historically higher than our employees', and for years our board saw employee figures on the first page and contractor figures in an appendix. I report them as one number and hold contractors to the same life-saving rules as our own crews: isolation and earthing before work, exclusion zones near live conductors, controls for felling near lines and for working alone in remote country. Contract terms matter as much as rules. Payment that rewards speed per kilometre pushes crews to take risks with chainsaws and elevated work platforms; payment for verified outcomes on multi-year contracts gives a firm reason to train and keep its people. Our combined recordable injury frequency fell from 8.6 to 4.1 per million hours worked between 2021 and 2025.

I closed a coal station in which I had worked for most of twenty-five years, and the experience shaped what I believe a closing operator owes its people. The first obligation is a date: fixed early, given to employees before the market hears it, and held unless safety or the reliability of the system genuinely requires a change. The second is to keep the plant safe to the end, which means retaining enough skilled people through the final years to run units that are being maintained for a shorter life. The third is practical help: retraining that leads to named jobs, redeployment within the company, independent financial advice for people weighing retirement and support for those who must move. At Bellcarrick we set up a A$31 million transition fund and a community trust whose board I still serve on. I also learnt, too late, that resident contractors are part of a station's workforce, and a closure plan that leaves them out is incomplete.

Both of my industries answer to rules made outside the company, and much of an operating executive's work is making those rules workable for the people on shift. As a generator we bid availability into the east-coast wholesale market, ran units to dispatch instructions every five minutes and had to tell the market operator promptly when a unit's capability changed. As a distributor we work under different obligations. If the market operator directs load shedding during a supply shortfall, the instruction reaches us through the transmission network, and we rotate it across feeders according to a priority list that protects hospitals and water pumping wherever the network allows. On mild, sunny spring days, rooftop solar can push demand from the grid so low that the system operator may need networks to reduce output from household systems, and we have had to build control-room procedures and customer explanations for that. I do not write these rules. I make sure our people can follow them under pressure.