An angry landholder is a workplace hazard, and the schedule makes it worse
Transmission builders tend to treat landholder hostility as a communications problem for the network owner. I argue it is a psychosocial hazard for the employer whose staff stand at the gate, and that schedule pressure is what turns it from unpleasant into harmful.
New transmission lines cross land owned by people who did not ask for them. Many landholders accept the line, negotiate fairly and treat our people with courtesy. A minority are angry, sometimes with good reason, and the first person they meet is usually not an executive or a planner. It is a liaison officer in their twenties carrying a gate key, an access notice and a biosecurity checklist, or a crew supervisor waiting to bring machinery onto a paddock. My position is that the hostility those people face is a psychosocial hazard owned by their employer, that it should be controlled by changing the work rather than by training people to absorb it, and that the most important control is relieving the schedule pressure that keeps them at the gate.
Australian work health and safety laws now treat psychosocial hazards expressly, and the regulators in the states where we build expect employers to identify and control them as they would a fall or an electrical hazard. I am not citing that as a compliance argument. I cite it because it changes the question a project team asks. The question is no longer how to help staff cope with difficult landholders. It is what about our work exposes staff to harm, and what we will change.
The farm gate as a workplace
I first saw this hazard in 2005, on a gas pipeline in western Queensland, when a grazier spent an hour shouting at a young liaison officer who had come to open a gate. She resigned two weeks later, and nobody, including me, recorded the episode as anything but a bad day. On transmission projects the exposure is larger. Routes are long, objections are organised and the timetable runs for years.
In late 2024, on a contested section of a new 500 kV line that Pennardine was building, our liaison officers reported 37 incidents of abuse or intimidation in six months. In one, an officer's vehicle was blocked on a farm track for ninety minutes. Two officers were on leave with psychological injuries, and four of eleven had resigned. When I read the reports, the pattern was not mainly about particular landholders. It was about how we had organised the work. Officers visited alone. They delivered notices drafted by the client in language landholders found peremptory. And they could not delay a crew without the project director's approval, which meant every judgement about safety at the gate had a schedule cost attached to it in the officer's mind.
Why schedule pressure multiplies the hazard
Hostility at a gate is unpleasant. It becomes harmful when the person facing it cannot leave. An officer who knows that a crew of twelve and two cranes are waiting, that the section is already behind and that the project director will ask why access was not achieved will stay in a conversation they should end. Supervisors under the same pressure will push a crew through a gate a landholder has asked them not to use. The hazard is the combination of hostility and the inability to withdraw, and the second part is entirely within the employer's control.
Our project director wanted to keep the schedule and respond with de-escalation training and the employee assistance programme. He was not careless; he was weighing liquidated damages and a client relationship. I argued that training would not change any of the conditions that produced the harm. Our managing director accepted three changes. Every visit to a property where an objection had been recorded would be made by two people. A liaison officer could stand a crew down at a gate without approval and would not be asked to justify that on the day. And we asked our client to rewrite the wording and timing of its access notices, which it did after a meeting with its land team.
We gave up about seven weeks of schedule on that section and absorbed A$3.2 million of standby, additional staff and recovery work, after negotiating partial relief from liquidated damages. In the next six months reported incidents fell to nine. The two officers returned on graduated plans, and no further psychological injury claims were made.
There was a lesson I did not expect. When we interviewed officers later, several said they had stopped reporting minor incidents months earlier because reporting changed nothing. The true count in the first period was higher than 37. A falling number of reports can mean the hazard is shrinking, or that people have given up telling you. A project team cannot tell the difference without asking.
What a board should ask to see
Most transmission builders report physical injuries to their boards in detail and psychosocial incidents, if at all, as a line in an employee assistance summary. I think a board overseeing a contested project should see four things together: incidents of abuse or intimidation by route section, the reporting rate and any sign it has fallen for the wrong reasons, the standing authority that frontline staff have to withdraw and how often they use it, and the schedule pressure on the sections where incidents cluster. Seen together, those numbers show whether the employer is controlling the hazard or asking its people to absorb it.
There are fair objections. Network owners hold the easements and run the community engagement, and a contractor cannot rewrite their process alone. Paired visits double a cost that clients may not reimburse. Some landholders find two visitors more intimidating than one. These are reasons to negotiate with clients and adapt the control, not reasons to leave an officer alone at a gate with a schedule behind her.
The conversation with our client was less difficult than our project director had feared. Its land team kept its own file of complaints about the access notices and had been arguing internally for a gentler approach. What changed the client's mind was a map of our incident reports beside the properties that had received notices in the preceding fortnight. The clusters matched. Network owners and their contractors each hold half of this evidence, and neither sees the hazard whole until the two sets of records are laid side by side. I now ask for that exchange in every contract on a contested route, before the first notice goes out.
I would ask any builder's board to put one question to management at its next safety review: on our most contested route, can the person at the gate walk away without asking permission, and does anyone record when they do? If the answer is no, the hazard is not the landholder.