Miners ‘must engage with the enemy’ in war of words: Cutifani
Mining has suffered as a result of its failure to communicate its contribution to society, industry veteran Mark Cutifani says, and he wants its leaders to drive more engagement.
The mining sector has long suffered as a result of its failure to communicate its contribution to society, industry veteran Mark Cutifani says, and he is calling for its leaders to drive more engagement, particularly with those who most vehemently oppose it.
Mr Cutifani, who has had a four decade-long career in the sector, most recently spending nearly a decade as chief executive of mining giant Anglo-American until the middle of last year, will be speaking at the Austmine conference in Adelaide next month, broadly addressing the topic of leadership in the sector.
Mr Cutifani said the role the mining sector plays in the global economy – and the ability to feed and provide energy and housing for more than eight billion people – was more important than ever.
But a concerted effort needed to be made in communicating that message to the wider community.
“In the mining industry we’ve tended to be very conservative and we’ve tended only to engage in real conversations with people that tend to support us, and that’s a small group,’’ he said.
“And instead of engaging with our most vociferous critics, which is what we should do, we tend to duck and weave and sort of point at them and say ‘they obviously don’t understand’, instead of engaging.
“In my view, the bad press we get is not a function of ignorance, it’s a function of our lack of proactive engagement of our harshest critics. And we have to get out there and have conversations – it doesn’t matter who it is.
“If someone has something they want to debate us on, we should be up for those debates, because at the end of the day facts will help us in all of those conversations.’’
For example, Mr Cutifani said without the products of mining the amount of land needed for cropping would probably need to double, which was clearly unachievable.
“Without the products of mining it would be a fraction of the population which we could support,’’ he said.
Mr Cutifani said his thesis was certainly not about trying to propound a risk-free image of the mining sector, but about spelling out clearly the benefits that humanity derives from mining, and also accepting that things did not always go perfectly, and owning that.
On the benefits side, Mr Cutifani said it was obvious to industry insiders that mining underpinned literally every pillar of the modern economy.
That message, and the mining sector’s role in the greening of the economy, was strongly positive, and should be celebrated and promoted. And the need for mined materials, and the need to extract them in a responsible manner, was only growing, he said.
“In comparing the amount of material moved and energy consumed to produce a tonne of copper in 1900 to 2020 – currently it’s up 16 times on both counts,’’ he said.
“And we use twice as much water at the same time.
“Our most important task is to reduce our footprints, whether it be water, energy, and physical footprints, to really demonstrate we are making the contributions to the society we would all like to see.’’
With regard to engaging with the industry’s critics, Mr Cutifani said this was crucial.
“We have lost the capacity to engage with society and its institutions in a way that is both sincere and constructive,’’ he said.
“The manifestation of this failure is we keep trying to lecture people on the good we do, instead of listening and addressing their concerns on what we don’t do.
“(And) we generally ignore feedback from our most critical observers, or we defer on the debate on the basis it is somehow someone else’s problem.’’
The Austmine conference, themed Transforming Our Future, will be held in Adelaide from May 9 to 11.
Other speakers include Australia’s chief scientist Dr Cathy Foley, BHP chief operating officer Edgar Basto, and the head of the Australian Space Agency, Enrico Palermo.
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