Decisions that cost money and kept people

Paying for town rooms when a client's camp would not change

In June 2022 a Western Australian parliamentary inquiry reported on sexual harassment of women in fly-in, fly-out mining. Our field services business then had 620 technicians, 31 of them women, on fourteen client sites. Our formal channels had received four harassment reports in the previous year. In October 2022 an external provider ran a confidential survey for us: 31% of the women and 9% of the men who responded said they had been sexually harassed at work or in camp in the previous twelve months. Most incidents happened in client camps, in wet messes and accommodation corridors, where our supervisors had no authority.

The positive duty under federal sex discrimination law had just begun, and our safety duty to our crews could not be handed to a host. I proposed a deployment standard: lockable rooms with a lit route to them, no shared bathrooms between unrelated crews, our own limits in the wet mess, an external reporting line that bypassed site supervisors and a joint review with the host's safety team before any crew flew. Where a camp fell short, we would house our crew in town at our cost.

Shane Coultas, who runs field services, opposed it because clients could choose contractors who asked for nothing. He was right about one. A Pilbara client declined to change its camp, and in July 2023 we withdrew from a rebuild contract renewal worth about A$14 million a year. Our chief financial officer, Marcus Tidd, questioned the A$3.2 million annual cost of rooms and buses. Rhona Elvery approved the standard after the board's health, safety and environment committee reviewed the survey.

Formal reports rose to 37 in 2023, as I had told the committee they would. Nineteen were substantiated and six people, including a supervisor, were dismissed. In the 2025 survey, 14% of women reported harassment. Women in field services rose from 31 to 68, and three clients now apply the standard to every contractor in their camps.

What I would change is the bus. Town rooms fifty minutes from site turned twelve-hour shifts into fourteen-hour days, at the edge of our own fatigue limit, and fatigue reports rose. I should have negotiated shorter shifts with clients before moving anyone, and asked our health and safety representatives to design the travel. We did both a year late.

Bringing contract machining into Ferrison when the grinding-media line closed

Ferrison made forged steel grinding balls for mineral processing mills on a line that employed 118 people. By late 2023 imported media were landing in Australia about 22% below our cost, and the line lost A$7.4 million that year. Closing it was not in dispute. What happened to its people was: 118 jobs were roughly one in forty of Ferrison's working residents.

Marcus Tidd proposed closure with redundancy, costing about A$9 million. Leanne Haddow, the Ferrison general manager, and I proposed an alternative. The foundry was paying contractors in Newcastle and western Sydney about A$11 million a year to finish-machine liners and wear parts. If we bought six machining centres and a vertical turning lathe for A$6.5 million and retrained line operators as machinists, most of the line's people could stay in the plant. The return was 9% against a hurdle of 12%. Marcus argued, fairly, that we would be accepting a weaker investment for social reasons and calling it strategy. Two of the contractors were family firms we had used for twenty years. I put both points in the board paper.

The board approved the proposal in March 2024 on a condition: machining cost per part within 5% of contractor rates by the end of FY2026. We consulted the workforce and the union before choosing who would train, offered every line employee a nine-month paid machining traineeship or voluntary redundancy on the agreement's terms, and gave the contractors six months' notice.

By June 2026, 74 of the 118 were working as machinists, 31 had taken voluntary redundancy, nine had retired and four had moved to other roles in the plant. Machining cost per part was 6% above contractor rates in FY2025 and 4% below them in FY2026, and lead time for a machined liner fell from nineteen days to eight. Every capital case at Quarrington now carries a workforce option beside the redundancy option.

What I would do differently is the entry to training. We assumed operators with years on a forging line could move straight into CNC programming. Twelve of the first forty failed the first module, mostly on mathematics they had last studied at fifteen. The foundation course we added for the second group should have come first. I would also have told the contractors myself, earlier, rather than through procurement.

Leaving the expired foundry agreement in place during industrial action

Ferrison's 2016 enterprise agreement passed its nominal expiry date in June 2020. It carried fourteen classifications, with progression mainly by time served. Bargaining began that September and stalled for eighteen months over wages and the classification structure. In March 2022, after a protected action ballot, the workforce began rolling four-hour stoppages and an overtime ban. By May we had lost about 2,100 tonnes of castings, roughly A$13 million of revenue, and two customers had moved liner orders to imported products.

Our external employment lawyers and Gareth Linnane, our chief operating officer, recommended applying to the Fair Work Commission to terminate the expired agreement. If the Commission agreed, employees would fall back to award terms, with pay for some trades lower by up to a quarter, and the union would be under heavy pressure to settle. The application was drafted.

I argued against filing it, for reasons that were not legal. The foundry provides about one job in six in Ferrison. An application would tell 640 people that the company would cut their pay to win, and they would carry that into every round that followed. I also doubted it would shorten the dispute by much. Judith Ambrey, who chairs our people and remuneration committee, asked to read both papers. Rhona Elvery decided not to file.

We gave up our strongest lever and accepted a higher wage outcome: 4.25%, 4% and 3.75% over three years against a budget of 3% a year, about A$4.6 million more than planned. In return the delegates agreed to replace fourteen classifications with seven, to progression by certified competency rather than years, and to multi-skilling across moulding, core-making and fettling. Both sides accepted a dispute procedure with a joint step before escalation. The agreement passed with 82% support in July 2022 and was approved that September.

Output per production employee rose 9% by FY2025, absenteeism fell from 6.1% to 4.3% and the plant has lost no time to industrial action since. The 2025 agreement settled in seven weeks, and the joint consultative committee now sees every major change proposal before it is final.

My own error came in the opening year. I let bargaining drift on wage percentages before putting the classification structure on the table, and the delegates read that delay, reasonably, as a lack of seriousness.

Apprentices who finish, and the women who had been leaving in year two

In 2021 the Ferrison foundry took on eighteen apprentices a year, and only 52% of those who had started between 2014 and 2017 finished their trade. One of the plant's 74 qualified tradespeople was a woman. A third of our boilermakers and fitters were over fifty-five, and across the group we employed 96 tradespeople from overseas on employer-sponsored skilled visas because we could not train or recruit enough at home.

Most apprentices left in their second year, when attention had faded, pay sat below what a labourer earned at the meat processor across town and they were placed beside tradespeople with no time to teach. Women had extra reasons: one change room on the site, protective clothing cut for men and supervisors who did not stop the comments.

In November 2021 I proposed raising the intake to forty a year from 2023, a twelve-week paid pre-apprenticeship open first to women and mature-age residents, four senior tradespeople taken off the tools to mentor full time, A$1.9 million for facilities and fitted protective equipment, an adult apprentice rate for anyone over twenty-one, and a rule tying sponsorship to training: each sponsored role would fund an apprentice place, and sponsored numbers would fall as completions rose. Sponsored tradespeople would be paid agreement rates, with relocation and fees met by us.

Gareth Linnane opposed losing four of our best boilermakers to mentoring in a record order year; he wanted thirty more sponsored welders. It did cost output: one liner order went out late in 2023, with an A$0.8 million penalty. The programme costs about A$2.9 million a year more than the one it replaced.

Of the 2021 intake, who had mentors from their second year, 15 of 18 finished. The 2026 intake is 41, nine of them women, and Ferrison now has 25 women apprentices and four qualified women tradespeople. Sponsored tradespeople across the group have fallen to 58, and the board receives completion and second-year retention by gender instead of intake.

What I would change is childcare. Three women left in their second year in 2023 because the town's only centre had a waiting list and opened after six o'clock shifts began. We funded twelve early-opening places at the Ferrison Children's Centre in 2024; I should have asked about childcare at the first pre-apprenticeship interviews.