Opinion
Too often, Australian companies operating offshore, particularly in countries with dubious political safeguards, seem to have a footy trip mentality – what happens on tour should stay on tour. Too often, also, a lack of attention is paid to those companies’ offshore pursuits, allowing that culture to persist.
In the past week, The Age has published a series of articles scrutinising the push by Hanrine – a company belonging to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart – into Ecuador.
Issues raised include whether the company has appropriately tackled the illegal mining scourge on its concessions in the township of La Merced de Buenos Aires and whether it was complicit with the heavy-handed Ecuadorian security force response to a largely peaceful community protest against Hanrine’s activities.
Hanrine not only denied all allegations but attacked the local community leaders as “anti-prosperity activists” in league with the armed illegal miners who have terrorised them. That is an insulting, condescending and inappropriate way to talk about people whose land you claim to want to share to improve their economic position.
It also stands at odds with claims from locals who did work for Hanrine that they were severely mistreated including being fed raw meat and denied communication with their families. So much for being the vanguard of prosperity.
Then there’s Llurimagua. As at La Merced de Buenos Aires, Hanrine is keen, along with many other miners, to explore this area for its copper as world demand for the metal reaches fresh records. BHP and South32 are both tipped to bid in the upcoming international tender for Llurimagua. The catch is that the area is internationally renowned for its environmental value, with hundreds of rare or endangered species living in its cloud forests.
Unlike the ASX-listed bidders, and probably others, neither Hanrine nor its parent, Hancock Prospecting, is a member of the International Council of Mining and Metals, which seeks to ensure fair treatment and to balance mining’s inevitable environmental impacts.
Hancock is, of course, a private company. It is not subject to the shareholder pressure that has forced so much change on the world’s mining industry in the past two decades. As such if it opts not to sign up to global standards that is its choice, but The Age would argue this is a poor signal to locals that it will conduct itself at world’s-best-practice levels.
Hanrine’s response to The Age is laced with indignation at being asked to address the concerns of a community living in effect, in the case of La Merced de Buenos Aires, in a war zone as illegal miners, organised criminals, Colombian revolutionaries and the government fight over the hillsides around the town.
Hillsides that, on paper, are Hanrine’s exploration grounds.
The statement also chides The Age for reporting on Ecuador during a cost-of-living crisis in Australia. This masthead is more than capable of doing more than one thing at once, and will never resile from the task of holding the powerful to account for their actions.
Hanrine’s chief executive in Ecuador, Carlos de Miguel, whose name the statement is issued under, faces disturbing claims from local workers that he would roam their sites with guard dogs and toting large weapons. Some say, unsurprisingly, they were afraid of him. In his lengthy statement, de Miguel did not address this alleged behaviour.
There is no suggestion Rinehart knew of or condoned the behaviour alleged in the articles.
Australian miners in many ways lead the world in technical ability, environmental responsibility and, by and large, governance. Aspiring to those standards, embodied in organisations like the international council, was not enough to prevent BHP’s deadly Samarco disaster in Brazil, or Rio Tinto’s closer-to-home Juukan Gorge disgrace.
Neither company was outwardly hostile to the communities they eventually harmed. Both have also sought to make right their damage. It is a marked contrast to Hanrine’s indifferent and dismissive conduct in Ecuador.