Simon Bennison says he hit the ground running when taking over as CEO at AMEC three years ago ... and he hasn’t stopped.
SINCE he took the reins at the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies three years ago, Simon Bennison has lifted the organisation’s profile by taking a vocal position on policy issues for the smaller players in Australia’s resources sector.
With a bachelor of science degree from Curtin University behind him, Mr Bennison immersed himself in Western Australia’s mining industry, working as the environmental manager for Greenbushes Tin for more than a decade.
He then moved to Canberra, where he worked in the aquaculture industry, heading up a number of industry organisations at both a state and federal levels.
Wanting to rejoin the resources sector, Mr Bennison moved back to Perth in 2008 to assume his current role of CEO at AMEC.
“It was great to come back into the resource sector,” Mr Bennison told WA Business News.
“Once you have spent as many years as I have in the sector and also in the industry organisations, to hit the ground running with the current issues isn’t a difficult task.”
However, he admits that managing AMEC through the GFC didn’t come without its difficulties.
“Coming in during the GFC was an absolute challenge; we had to make sure AMEC was focused on delivering the policy environment back to its membership to make sure it weathered this period,” Mr Bennison says.
“And that was a battle because the government was starting to look at changes to the business environment … and we were starting to see benefits being eroded by government and we thought the timing was pretty shocking for that to happen.”
He says issues surrounding taxes, approvals processes and tenement conditions are more prevalent now than at any time in the association’s 30-year history.
“The issues that have been in front of us like the resource rent tax are very high-profile issues.
“We’ve been there for the smaller companies that need all the assistance they can get to defend their position, and I think we felt an obligation that nobody else was going to fight harder than us (sic), so we did stick our head up very high deliberately.”
However, the perception that AMEC ventures too much into the politics of government policy and decisions is something that Mr Bennison says he wants to avoid.
But ensuring AMEC remains at the forefront of key policy issues while remaining apolitical has been a key challenge.
“Some people think we get a little too close to the politics of it even though we are an apolitical organisation,” he says.
“Our political objectivity is very important to us. I think we’ve just been through a period of what we believe and what our membership believes is some extraordinarily bad public policy by this federal government relating to our sector, and it’s probably seen to be government bashing, but we’re not.”
At a federal level, Mr Bennison says the biggest issue affecting its members is currently the Minerals Resource Rent Tax.
He claims the MRRT is one of the most ‘‘amazing’’ bits of evolving policy ever seen in Australia.
‘‘I’ve never seen a period of continuation of poor public policy relating to mining and exploration than what the last 18 months has brought about,” Mr Bennison says.
“We have the carbon tax and the fuel credit scheme, which has now become a diesel tax … which we believe will seriously disadvantage the smaller players.”
With eight staff located in Perth and a small team at AMEC’s Brisbane and Sydney offices, Mr Bennison says the amount on the association’s agenda could be overwhelming.
“There has been an enormous amount on our agenda for an organisation of our size … and I don’t think we’ve ever seen the industry become more determined about federal policy than what we have seen over the last couple of years,” he says.
“Advocating strong policy that is going to enable the industry to grow and survive is what we’re about … but it can be difficult because we have so much on our plate at the moment, we have something like 25 submissions to get in by the end of this year at the various state and federal levels.”
Despite AMEC being nominally a national body, Mr Bennison was responsible for lifting its profile by setting up the Sydney and Brisbane offices.
“While the bulk of our membership does sit in Western Australia, we were very conscious of the fact that we still wanted to better develop our eastern seaboard presence and represent those companies that were part of AMEC on the east coast,” he says.
Mr Bennison also plans to focus on providing additional services to members.
“We’d like to identify what better ‘value- add’ the organisation can bring back to its membership away from the policy environment, and get their view on what we could be doing better,” he says.
“I think the important thing about AMEC is that it has a terrific membership; there are over 330 companies involved and I don’t know many organisations in this category have that kind of representation of companies.”
AMEC already runs a convention each year, investor briefings and networking events for members.
