Professional Engineering Competency Standards in the Queensland Mining Industry

A key issue in maintaining the mining industryÆs social contract to access community-owned resources, is the need to be able to demonstrate professional management of resource extraction and the risk associated with mining hazards. Significant failures such as disease relating to coal dust and asbestos and mine disasters such as Moura, Appin and Gretley have resulted in judicial and legislative interventions that respond to the community outcry but do not necessarily effectively manage the longer term risk in a sector driven by new technology. With the implementation of recent amendments to the Queensland Professional Engineers Act, senior engineers in all industries including the mining industry are required to be registered and to demonstrate that they have æmaintained competency in the practice of engineering in the area of engineering for which the (engineer) is ... registeredÆ. This may be facilitated through a report produced by an æAssessing EntityÆ. These entities are approved by the Minister on advice from the Board of Professional Engineers, Queensland. Engineers Australia and The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (The AusIMM) are the two professional bodies approved as æassessing entitiesÆ charged with facilitating successful implementation of the process established by the legislation. The scope of the legislation covers engineering enterprises in Queensland and engineering activities elsewhere that may have been designed in Queensland. There is currently a challenge to determine what the necessary health and safety competencies for the mining industry are and how the maintenance of these competencies will be assessed. The different approaches taken by the two assessing entities are compared and contrasted. At the legislative level, establishing an obligation to assess professional competency is simple, but at the level of the profession, it is new ground that warrants a substantial research and development input. The challenge is to develop criteria by which the quality of such system can be assessed. The comparison is made by considering such issues as equity, effectiveness, efficiency, objectiveness and transparency. These five indicators are considered in terms of how they are applied in other sectors and how they might be applied in the mining sector.