Corporate Risk, Mining Camps and Knowledge/Power

Abstract

Australia is currently in the midst of a major resources boom. However the benefits from the boom are unevenly distributed, with state governments collecting billions in royalties, and mining companies billions in profits. The costs are borne mostly at a local level by regional communities on the frontier of the mining boom, surrounded by thousands of men housed in work camps. The escalating reliance on non-resident workers housed in camps carries significant risks for individual workers, host communities and the provision of human services and infrastructure. These include rising rates of fatigue-related death and injuries, rising levels of alcohol-fuelled violence, illegally erected and unregulated work camps, soaring housing costs and other costs of living, and stretched basic infrastructure undermining the sustainability of these towns. But these costs have generally escaped industry, government and academic scrutiny. This chapter directs a critical gaze at the hopelessly compromised industry funded research vital to legitimating the resource sector’s self-serving knowledge claims that it is committed to social sustainability and corporate responsibility. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first argues that post-industrial mining regimes mask and privatise these harms and risks, shifting them on to workers, families and communities. The second part links the privatisation of these risks with the political economy of privatised knowledge embedded in the approvals process for major resource sector projects.