A host's mine camp is still the contractor's workplace

Mining-services contractors in Australia usually speak of camps as the client's business. The client owns the village, sets the rules for the wet mess, employs the security staff and decides who sleeps next to whom. When a contractor's technician is harassed in a corridor at eleven at night, the contractor's instinct is to report it to the host and wait. My position is that a contractor which sends people to live in another company's camp owns the conditions of that camp as far as its own crew is concerned. It must verify them before deployment and be prepared to pay for alternatives when the host will not change them. A board that cannot see that cost in its tenders is not seeing the hazard.

I want to be precise about the claim. I am not arguing that contractors should run their clients' camps, or that hosts carry less responsibility than they do. Most of the camp operators I deal with take the problem seriously, and several have improved faster than we have. The argument concerns what a contractor does when conditions are not good enough, and whether its executives and directors know.

Two duty holders and one unlit walkway

Australian work health and safety law is plain on two points that matter here. A duty cannot be transferred to another person. Where more than one business has a duty in relation to the same matter, each must consult, co-operate and co-ordinate with the others. Since 2022 most jurisdictions have also named psychosocial hazards in their regulations, which settled any doubt that harassment, isolation and fatigue are hazards like any other. Federal sex discrimination law has, since December 2022, required employers to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate sexual harassment as far as possible. None of this stops at the boom gate.

In practice a shared duty easily becomes nobody's. In October 2022 we surveyed our 620 field technicians through an external provider, after a Western Australian parliamentary inquiry had reported that year on sexual harassment of women in fly-in, fly-out mining. Thirty-one per cent of the women who responded said they had been sexually harassed at work or in camp in the previous twelve months. Our formal channels had received four complaints. When we mapped where incidents happened, most were in places we had never inspected: the path from the wet mess to the accommodation blocks, shared bathrooms, a laundry with no lighting after ten. One walkway at a Pilbara camp had three broken lights that had been reported to the operator twice. We learnt about it from an exit interview, in which a technician said she had stopped walking it alone.

I had held a version of the client's-business view for years. At a previous employer I had asked hosts about room standards and rest before accepting shutdown work, but I had never asked who walked where at night. Nobody had decided to tolerate that walkway. The host assumed contractors would raise problems. We assumed the host had them in hand. Our supervisors, who lived in the same camp, did not see camp conditions as part of their job, and our crews did not expect us to act on something that happened after shift. Each party behaved reasonably within its own understanding, and the result was a hazard nobody controlled.

Conditions before the crew flies

From February 2023 we stopped treating camp conditions as information and began treating them as a condition of deployment. Before a crew of ours flies to a site, the host's safety team and ours review a short standard together. Rooms must lock, and the route to them must be lit. Bathrooms are not shared between unrelated crews. Our people are bound by our limits in the wet mess, whatever the camp's own rules allow. Every member of the crew can use an external reporting line that does not pass through a site supervisor, and hears about it in the pre-deployment briefing rather than in an induction folder. We record the review, and our health and safety representatives can ask to see it.

Most hosts agreed to most of it, and some already did more. One client declined to change its camp. We housed our crew in a town fifty minutes away while we finished the work, then withdrew from that contract's renewal, worth about A$14 million a year. Across all sites, alternative rooms and transport now cost us about A$3.2 million a year.

The standard had a cost I did not foresee. A fifty-minute bus trip at each end of a twelve-hour shift makes a fourteen-hour day, and fatigue reports rose. We had replaced one psychosocial hazard with another, which is exactly the trap the hierarchy of controls exists to prevent. We now settle shift length with the client before we move anyone out of camp, and our representatives design the travel arrangements with us.

The measures that matter have moved. Formal reports rose to 37 in 2023. I told the board to expect that, because a rising count after long silence usually means people have begun to trust the channel. Nineteen were substantiated and six people were dismissed. In our 2025 survey, 14% of women reported harassment. That is still far too high, and we publish it internally at that level rather than rounding it into a trend.

Putting the cost in the tender

The objection I hear most often from other contractors is commercial. If one contractor prices accommodation conditions into its tender and another does not, the client picks the cheaper bid. Shane Coultas, who runs our field services business, made exactly that argument to me in 2022, and he was right that we would lose work. We did.

My answer is that the cost exists whether or not it appears in the tender. It is carried by the technician who stops walking to the laundry, by the woman who leaves the industry after two rotations, by the supervisor dismissed eighteen months too late and by the company that discovers its exposure in a regulator's letter. A contractor that leaves accommodation conditions out of its price is not cheaper. It has moved the cost onto its people and its future.

I would ask contractors' boards to do three things. Ask management where your people sleep, site by site, and who has inspected those places. Require the cost of meeting your own conditions to appear as a line in every tender for remote work, so that a decision to absorb or waive it is visible. And compare harassment prevalence from a confidential survey with formal complaints every year. When the gap between them is wide, the reporting system is the problem, and a low complaint count is not good news.

I would ask hosts to welcome these conversations rather than treat them as commercial friction. Three of our clients have since applied our standard to every contractor in their camps, a better outcome than we could have achieved alone. Crews do not distinguish between host and contractor when they walk back to their rooms at night, and the companies that send them there should not either.