Global Indigenous Employment Program

Overview

A successful indigenous employment program at the Company's Phosphate Hill chemical manufacturing facility in regional Queensland, Australia has been operating for the past 10 years. The program has provided learning and employment opportunities to indigenous people from the local area. The centrepiece of the program is the two-year employment traineeship; however, the long-term success has come from engaging locally and encouraging education to create a talent pool of employable people.

This keystone project aims to replicate the success of the Phosphate Hill program across the Company's other remote sites in Australia and Canada's Northwest Territories.

Status

The strategic direction for this project has been set, and our Australian Indigenous Employment Strategy is currently being rolled out across the Pilbara and Mt Isa regions.

Results

We released our Sustainable Communities Policy in FY2011/12, formalising our pledge to respect the values and cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples, considering their needs and wishes when carrying out our operations.

In the same year, we signed the Australian Employment Covenant (AEC), committing us to promote Indigenous employment within our business.

The AEC is an industry driven initiative supported by the Australian Federal Government, Australian employers and Indigenous people. It aims to secure 50,000 sustainable jobs for Indigenous Australians, breaking the cycle of unemployment and poverty. As signatories, we will provide access to opportunities for Indigenous people who meet our prerequisites and training requirements for each role.

Subsequent to this, we developed an Australian Indigenous Employment Strategy, which was approved for implementation in September 2012 and aims to deliver meaningful employment outcomes for indigenous Australians and to contribute to closing the gap on social disparity between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

The Strategy builds on our experience with the Phosphate Hill Indigenous Traineeship Program, which has doubled in size this year, and the engagement of indigenous employees from local indigenous communities within our Dyno Nobel mine site operations.

The strategy is being piloted in the Pilbara region and the Mt Isa Region with a view to expand Australia-wide, and then globally.