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

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.

While our initial investigations have found that not all of our sites can offer the same employment opportunities as Phosphate Hill, we will do so where possible. The Pilbara in Western Australia has been identified as the next focus for the program. In June 2011, Incitec Pivot Limited (IPL) 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.

The AEC provides us with an industry network of shared experiences to draw from and will help us to implement our program, by providing partnerships, case studies, job advertisements, workshops, educational materials and mentoring.

Results

Our primary metric for this keystone project is the number of participants in the Indigenous Training Program. During FY2010/11, four participants commenced the program in Mount Isa and Phosphate Hill, taking the total number involved in the two year program to six.