Howard said the move would make “a good system better” if the states agreed.

But his proposal to spread the liability for mine accidents came under fire from Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union president Tony Maher, who said Howard’s claim that mine managers are solely responsible for accidents is false, and that any changes would lower safety standards.

Maher told Australian Associated Press: “There’ll be lower standards if they are changed. Basically he’ll have blood on his hands. More people will die. More people will be injured.

“Safety laws are the next cab off the rank if the Howard Government is re-elected.”

However, the Minerals Council of Australia came back with a statement saying that it “deplores attempts by parts of the union movement and the NSW Government to falsely portray the prime minister’s commitment to regulatory reform in the minerals industry as undermining mine safety standards”.

“This is simply an ideologically driven attempt to distract from the real agenda,” MCA chief executive Mitchell Hooke said. “Any suggestion that industry would accept any diminution in mine safety standards could not be further from the truth.

“There cannot be any reduction in safety standards, but there must be reform to occupational health and safety regulatory systems across all jurisdictions if the industry is to achieve its goal of zero harm in the workplace.”

Speaking at a doorstop interview, Howard said the proposals were not designed to make mines less safe; rather they were aimed at spreading the responsibility to where it should be.

“At the moment it’s hard to get qualified mine managers because so much of the responsibility criminally is focused on them and not necessarily on other people who may carry the responsibility for things when they go wrong,” he said. “But under the law they don’t have the same amount of liability. It’s a question of the fair sharing of burden, not reducing mine safety.”

One way of improving mine safety is through the introduction of greater automation into the mining sector or, as the experts put it, through the elimination or minimisation of the man-machine interface.

An example of this is a new copper mine under construction in the US, which is set to become one of the first in the world to use a fully automated blast hole drilling system.

The operators of Freeport McMoRan’s Safford copper mine in Arizona, which was originally Phelps Dodge’s development before the $33 billion merger with Freeport, are planning to use Atlas Copco Pit Viper 271 rigs in blast hole drilling.

Initially, the drills will be semi-automated, with an operator who will be able to level the rig and start it drilling at the push of a button, but within a year they are expected to become fully autonomous.

But speaking before the merger, Phelps Dodge Mine Technology Group general manager Steve Holmes said the main reasons the company had gone down the automation path were to achieve improved drilling efficiency and reduce costs.

“The problem is some [drill] operators are very good, some are kind of average and some are not really very good at all,” he explained. “A lot of the technology we’re applying is targeted at eliminating that variance, which is very costly and very inefficient.

“It [automated drilling] gives you very high levels of consistency in performance. You never run the machine past its specification. You never crank down on the rotary head and put too much ground pressure on the drill or burn up the bit or the stabiliser.

“It’s the man-machine interface that we’re eliminating and the variance created by that interface that we’re attacking.”

According to Holmes, Phelps Dodge had enjoyed a 20% increase in drilling productivity just using the auto-levelling and auto-drilling functions in testing, and further improvements were likely with full automation.

Holmes said there was “no question” the automated drilling system at Safford would be a major point of interest for other mining companies once it eventually started operation.

While they were only beginning to look at the technologies, Phelps Dodge had been working with them for the past couple of years to get them customised to its mining applications.

Holmes believes the day will eventually arrive when all primary production equipment on minesites are fully automated, but he said that first there were some huge hurdles to overcome.

“How many 50-year-old mine managers even feel comfortable with their PC?” he asked. “Five or 10 years ago, they didn’t even have one.

“You’ve got to take the mining culture into the age of new technology and that’s not going to be a trip that’s travelled fast. It’s going to be step-by-step, getting people comfortable.”

As well as the safety improvements stemming from a reduced man-machine interface, other benefits the company was expecting from the implementation of the technology included lower labour costs, reduced drill maintenance requirements and higher machine availability.

So what is stopping this move towards greater automation? After all, the technology is in place now. In short the problem is mine planning.

To fully use automation, there will need to be considerable redesign of both opencut and underground operations.

Published in the March 2006 Australia’s Mining Monthly