LOCAL governments in regional Australia have told a federal parliamentary probe into the use of fly-in, fly-out workers in the resources industry that the increasing use of the practice was putting pressure on their infrastructure and house prices.
The Pilbara Regional Council told the inquiry that even isolated fly-in, fly-out camps could generate additional local government costs as workers were taken by bus to and from airports along local roads, which were not designed or built for such activity.
The council said commuting workers had put upward pressure on house prices and rents in the region.
“One local government in the Pilbara region has experienced an explosion in average housing rentals from approximately $350 per week to $2000 per week over a three-year period,” the PRC said in its submission.
Kalgoorlie-Boulder Chamber of Commerce and Industry said fly-in, fly-out arrangements had become a habit for many mining companies and major contractors.
“They do not consider other options that contribute to the communities within the immediate proximity of their current or prospective operations,” the chamber said.
“There is little doubt that FIFO will ultimately destroy the social fabric of this community. It is already noticeable that sporting groups and other community organisations are shrinking as employment trends change.”
The Shire of Yilgarn highlighted increased demand for the provision of government services, the drain of young families moving to cities and regional centres and not enough commonwealth funding to meet the social needs for community development as among the biggest issues caused by mobile workforces.
Fortescue Metals Group joined the critics of the practice and said that until recently it had a 100 per cent residential workforce.
But the company said this changed because of constraints such as inadequate volume of government-released land for development, escalating housing costs in the Pilbara, a legacy of inadequate state government planning in earlier periods and a lack of alignment between local, state and federal government planning and service provision.
Fortescue said the cost of housing put pressure on the development of small businesses to service permanent residents of communities and that the lack of access to quality secondary education could be another deterrent to permanent residency.
“In the absence of sufficient housing and infrastructure for the foreseeable future, FIFO becomes the only viable option to meet the growth needs of the resources sector,” Fortescue’s submission said, adding that it only utilised mobile work arrangements where residential workforces were not accessible or viable.
AngloGold Ashanti said fly-in, fly-out had become a necessary tool for filling skills shortages.
“Fly-in, fly-out enables AngloGold Ashanti to access the number and type of workers it needs to effectively run its mine, something that would be impossible in a residential arrangement, which does not appeal to the majority of workers,” the company’s submission said.
“Individuals would not see it as desirable to own houses in a town with an uncertain future and, if a town was developed around a single operation in a remote location, with no other reason for existence, it would die as soon as mining ends.”
