AMEC softens hardline tone

IN the heart of West Perth an unsightly yet unobtrusive three-storey concrete building is tucked away behind the business district’s leafy green trees.

On the third floor, in a large, bright and tidy office, an unassuming woman is quietly working away.

Quietly working on changes that some of her surrounding business neighbours may not be so well prepared for.

At first glance of her extensive CV, Anne Arnold is not the most obvious choice as the newly-installed chief of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies – let alone someone who may be about to ruffle some feathers.

She has no mining experience and has replaced the firm-talking George Savell, who was in place for 16 years of AMEC’s 22-year-old history and was as much AMEC as the industry he represented.

She is also a wife, a mother-of-three and a woman in an organisation that represents a highly male dominated industry.

Something she is the first to admit.

“It must have just been my preconceived notion that it was a male dominated industry and I thought they just might want a man,” Ms Arnold said.

However, Ms Arnold is also an economist by training. She has worked for a merchant bank in London, a land development lobby group and, more recently, directed policy at the WA Department of Housing and Works.

AMEC is a small member-based industry group, with approximately 200 company and individual members, which has advocated somewhat doggedly for the Australian mining and exploration industry for the past 22 years.

Yet despite representing part of an industry that is a pillar of the national and State economy, the mining industry has, in recent years, found itself backed into a corner.

Its membership, the small or junior mining and exploration sector, is in decline due to consolidation and other market forces, while growing social concern about the environment and Aboriginal rights has put a black mark against mining companies in general.

During the period when Mr Savell was in charge AMEC went in to bat for the junior sector, often on the front foot which earned it a mantle of being somewhat hardline.

AMEC has fought for better access to land; calling for changes to the Native Title act, access to finance; tax breaks for investing in junior exploration and access to intellectual material; and calling for more money to be invested in tertiary education courses and research and development for the mining industry. 

Some of these recommendations are due to go before Federal Parliament before the end of the year.

It appears Ms Arnold’s appointment by AMEC’s 13-member council has been employed to redirect its weary image.

“George did a wonderful job in establishing AMEC,” she said.

“But it’s just new eyes now and I want to do things differently.

“In organisational terms I think women think quite differently than men do. Women approach things in a different way. It’s much less about power and much more about outcomes and collegiate decision making.”

Already AMEC is beginning to undergo changes.

Next year the organisation will shift into new offices on Richardson Street, West Perth. A lot of money is being spent on a new computer system so that policy, once developed, can be rapidly published.

However, these are only the physical changes. In the longer term more fundamental changes will emerge that may result in a re-routing of some of AMEC’s policies.

The committee system on the AMEC council is being shaken up.

Committees are being asked to re-value their need as well as their members and to identify future issues.

Ms Arnold said she hoped to re-direct AMEC over the next five years.

Key parts of the plans include refocusing AMEC to being totally exploration focused as well as being a WA-based organisation rather than a national representative body.

52-year-old Ms Arnold acknowledges that this may not sit easily with part of AMEC’s membership and that she could have an uphill battle ahead of her which will absorb a lot of her time.

“It’s not going to be a seismic shift, there is not a lot of me and I think it will take time for council to fully formulate how it wants to go,” she said

“But I think a number of things have focused me to say we need to change.

“I know that there are those guys out there who want Native Title, the environment and everything else to go away tomorrow.

“They would like it to go back to being the sixties where they could go kick rocks and they never had to ask anyone and it was in the bush and no-one cared.

“But it is not the sixties anymore. It’s 40 years later and there is a regulatory and government framework and an environmental framework and a sustainability framework.

Ms Arnold said there had been too much “grandstanding” over small victories, which she said she believed, was more about being part of the problem than the solution.

And while she acknowledges the nature of the personalities in the mining business she said there was a different way to represent the industry.

“They’re high risk takers, very aggressive, they want results and they don’t want to be mucked around. They are very outspoken and they are an industry that is not well liked,” Ms Arnold said.

“But that does not mean you have to represent them in the same way as well because if it does not work then what is the point of doing it.

“You can pound your chest and say this is outrageous but if it does not get you anywhere what use is it to you then. You lobby in a much more subtle and sophisticated way.”

For the last word on Native Title, an issue that AMEC has been so focused on since the Native Title Act became law almost 10 years ago, Ms Arnold said she had no magic solution.

“All we can do is work with every other stakeholder as best we can to craft the best possible outcome,” she said.