Mining safety in Australia still remains a problem - primarily because the industry's collective management is not good at absorbing bad news and, on the whole, fails to learn from its mistakes. National secretary for the Australian Workers' Union, Bill Shorten, said despite the fact royal commissions were repeatedly held after major fatality incidents, not too much had changed in the area of occupational health and safety over the past 120 years. "Are we missing the point?" he put to the IIR Conferences audience in Perth. "Has anyone ever gone to jail over repeated OHS recommendations being ignored? No. "I mean are fatalities in fact the best indicators of the daily risk and so on? There are so many games played with numbers that I shake myself sometimes. "If you do take away the drop in multiple fatalities in mining disasters over the last century, I cannot see any dramatic reduction in mining fatalities. "We seem to learn nothing from history in the Australia resources sector. "The point is that every time something goes wrong, we come back and rediscover facts which were already discovered beforehand.
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