FIFO workforce urged to get it right on census night

THE Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia is urging the resource sector’s army of fly-in, fly-out workers to accurately complete their census forms this Tuesday to ensure the state’s fast-growing regional centres don’t miss out on vital funding and infrastructure.

The census data will provide an up-to-date picture of the scale and spread of fly-in, fly-out personnel working in WA, but only if these workers correctly identify their ‘usual place of residence’.

It’s an issue the CME has worked closely with the Australian Bureau of Statistics to address, and CME chief executive Reg Howard-Smith said a lot of work had gone into engaging with the fly-in, fly-out workers.

“Under the census if you spend at least half your time at the workplace, in a fly-in, fly-out village, then that is deemed to be their residence,” Mr Howard-Smith told WA Business News.

“We have been working with ABS to ensure this information gets out and about and companies persist in the process of explaining it.”

The census literature explains how to accurately describe your usual place of residence, but for a range of reasons many fly-in, fly-out workers have historically identified the location of their family home rather than their workplace.

This has a detrimental impact on the regional centres they work in or work close to, which miss out on important social infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and law enforcement because the census does not accurately reflect their actual population.

In the past two years the CME has undertaken its own population studies in the Pilbara because the ABS statistics were out of date.

“If you look at the resource sector and this isn’t a criticism of the ABS, their data is soon out of date with rapid expansion of the Pilbara area for example,” Mr Howard-Smith said.

The CME estimates the fly-in, fly-out contingent of the resource sector could be at least 45,000 people and this figure doesn’t take into account staff working on the construction phase of projects.

Mr Howard-Smith said the chamber’s work suggested that about 52 per cent of workers in the resource sector were employed on a fly-in, fly-out basis, with many of them working in rapidly growing regional centres such as Karratha and Port Hedland.

“The social impact is really around the softer side of development for any community but it’s heightened in the case of the resource sector,” he said.

“When you have expanding towns like Karratha and Port Hedland, if you are not getting the right data provisions aren’t being made for the necessary things in life.”

The undercount in a number of WA regions in the 2006 census was as high as 24 per cent, an anomaly that cost many fast-growing centres, like Kalgoorlie-Boulder, valuable funding.

The census data is used to calculate funding for local government, WA’s share of the GST revenue and provides a planning tool for businesses and not-for-profit organisations.

Census WA has employed more than 3,000 staff to collect forms as well as assigned special teams to collect information from remote and regional communities.

The census takes place on Tuesday August 9 and households can either complete their form for collection on August 10 or fill it out online.