Indigenous collaboration
FOR disadvantaged groups like Indigenous Australians to better participate in the infrastructure and mining sectors, collaboration is needed at all levels.
Often people from disadvantaged groups struggle to participate as businesses in plant intensive industries due to the cost of equipment to deliver their services, struggles with compliance requirements and technology, and not having a good network of contacts to help find business in the short term and to develop a pipeline of work in the long term.
Horizontal directional drilling, civil construction and project management company Maxibor is working to stop this cycle of disadvantage, which has impacts on health, well-being, education and community, and is encouraging all stakeholders to support and help build up micro-businesses across the sector.
Maxibor chief financial officer Jeff Simpson said the company’s Collaborative Indigenous Business Model embraced respect, relationship and response to help achieve three corporate objectives: sustainable profitability, growing the value of the business assets of shareholders, alliance partners and customers, and building a future everyone can look forward to.
“The first two objectives are economic, the third social, but thinking in the context of these three objectives allows a wider set of outcomes beyond the economic to be achieved,” he said.
“Social and environmental outcomes are just as important.”
Mr Simpson said the model requires all key stakeholders across the delivery chain to collaborate to achieve the objective of growing the micro business.
According to Christine Sindely, an Arabunna woman from South Australia, who in 2016 authored the Aboriginal Engagement Guidelines for the WA Civil Contractors Federation (CCF), the collaborative Indigenous business model is a logical extension of the engagement efforts to help make a difference for Indigenous Australians in the mining and infrastructure sectors.
“Over the past decade numerous Indigenous Australians have had the opportunity to develop skills as an employee or small sub-contractor,” Ms Sindely said.
“Many are now ready to take the next step and move to providing those services on a larger scale, direct to asset owners or principal contractors.
“The collaborative business model facilitates this opportunity through providing the added capacity in the form of plant and equipment and business development and administrative knowledge and support to deliver at that level”.
Benefits to the mining industry of implementing the model include increasing social responsibly and supplier loyalty, as well as creating value and profitably for Indigenous business owners to participate in projects.
Native Earthworks plant operator and Torres Strait Islander Chris Young can attest to the benefits of collaboration, having secured a wet hire plant contract on the West Gate Tunnel Project under construction in Melbourne.
“I would not have been able to participate at this level in a $6.7b project such as this without collaborative support across the full delivery chain,” Mr Young said.
“A leading social procurement policy specialist from the Victorian Government, diversity appreciation from the principal contractors CPB and John Holland, capacity in the form of plant from Orange Hire and knowledge sharing from Maxibor have all contributed to providing a pathway for my 100pc Indigenous-owned Native Earthworks business to be positioned to move to another level.
“Without the collaborative business model I would be still out in the paddocks.”