Fly In, Fly Out workers — impact on families
HON ALISON XAMON (East Metropolitan) [8.14 pm]: I rise tonight because I want to talk about the important issue of fly in, fly out workers and their families. I am compelled to do this because there has been an increasing level of public chatter about the nature of FIFO work and how it impacts on families. Members will know that I feel very strongly about the need to respect and support different forms of families. I believe very strongly that a broad range of family arrangements is positive for society and that there is no one right way to bring up children. Parenting is not easy. We know that children will grow and flourish across a diversity of home situations. But, unfortunately, certain segments of our community do not accept this, and some types of families have been, and continue to be, the subject of vilification. It is something that I am no stranger to, having been a young single parent. Increasingly, I hear similar adverse judgements about families who are living under FIFO arrangements. I am concerned about the level of negative characterisation of families who choose to or need to live a FIFO lifestyle. Criticism has been coming from all sides. I have heard it from politicians, but also from the media, policy makers, community groups and individuals.
I am not here to talk about the complexities of the FIFO arrangement. The purpose of my statement tonight is not to go into the pros and cons of FIFO, such as the role of mining companies, regional infrastructure and life above the twenty-sixth parallel. The fact of the matter is that at this point tens of thousands of Western Australians live a FIFO lifestyle. How we talk about FIFO has a direct impact on their lives and their place within our community. Around 50 000 WA workers are FIFO or DIDO—that is, drive in, drive out—and that constitutes 50 per cent of workers in the resource sector. This number is set to increase quite significantly in the future. There is a great diversity of FIFO situations. There is no such thing as a generic FIFO. Rosters can be for even times, such as seven days on and seven days off or two weeks away and two weeks home. Increasingly, we are seeing nine days on and five days off and eight days on and six days off. There are, of course, the more problematic extended rosters commonly found in construction, which can take people away from their homes for months at a time. Often it is the father who works away, but there are many mothers, grandparents, siblings and adult children who come and go from families as a result of these arrangements.
There are legitimate reasons why families choose not to relocate to the site of work. Some mine sites are very isolated; they are hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town. Other workers fly out to oil and gas platforms under quite different employment and living conditions from those of land-based miners. Some fly to mines overseas and others drive to the mine and drive home again for weekends. It is obviously wrong to suggest that there is some generic arrangement. Importantly, though, research on FIFO families does not demonstrate that they have greater mental health or parenting risks than any other family. It does, however, show that they have unique challenges. We know that the FIFO arrangement does not work for some families. On the other hand, we know that the FIFO arrangement works incredibly successfully for many families and has been incredibly important to the health of those families. Many things will influence how these families cope. For FIFO families, it can obviously include the characteristics of the family itself, as well as employment conditions, including rosters, and the sorts of facilities and communication options that are available on-site. Community support and attitudes also have a very big impact on these families. Employers also have an important role to play. I urge employers to take into account the impact on families when they determine what sort of roster arrangement they look at, particularly for parents. Access to appropriate support is also crucial. In addition to the important roles played by community health nurses and other professionals, increasingly there is some fantastic tailored support available and also some new WA-based groups such as FIFO Families, which offers some great grassroots, peer and expert support.
But as a community we also have some responsibility and a role to play in how FIFO families cope with parenting and everyday life, because community attitudes and levels of support, as well as community understanding, are absolutely crucial. I hear of women in my electorate who have been made to feel unwelcome at their local playgroups because their husbands are engaged in FIFO arrangements. They get accused of not caring about their families; they get accused of caring more about money than their children. Those sorts of comments are absolutely appalling and absolutely untrue. I want people to think about the sorts of effects that those comments have on other people. Those sorts of comments and those sorts of attitudes are absolutely unacceptable. We are predicating our social fabric around the nine-to-five, five-day working week, but more than 50 per cent of us—parliamentarians included—do not fit into this model and certainly my family does not. What time is it now? Non-standard working hours and rosters can be a challenge, but I point out that they can also present a fabulous range of opportunities. For FIFO families, the benefits of blocks of time at home can also benefit communities. For example, I recently saw a comment in a WA newspaper claiming that FIFO arrangements are robbing local volunteer fire brigades of people. I would also like to see reflected in the commentary that in some cases at least, the opposite is true. I know of one local volunteer fire brigade in my electorate whose FIFO members are particularly valued, because when they are home on break they are available to fight fires during the week at a time when it can be more difficult to get volunteers who are otherwise engaged in nine-to-five work hours. FIFO dads are also more likely to have a regular presence at school and that is precisely because of the nature of their working arrangements. Therefore, to characterise FIFO families only in negative terms is at best unhelpful, and at worst I think can be deeply alienating and really offensive; it is also wrong. This negative stereotyping only serves to further isolate these families. Let us remember also that for some families a FIFO lifestyle is their only opportunity to get ahead financially. Apparently, more than 36 000 WA households were unable to pay power bills this year and we know that economic strain is a significant contributor to family breakdown. Therefore, I think it is ironic that on the one hand we are going on about economic strain and burden on many WA families while on the other hand we are contributing to rhetoric that condemns those families who choose FIFO arrangements.
In August this year, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Australia launched an inquiry into the experience of fly in, fly out and drive in, drive out workers in regional Australia. I welcome this; there is not enough data and too much commentary is based on really unhelpful anecdotes and prejudices. I look forward to the findings of the inquiry, but in the meantime I finish by saying that we need to be very conscious of our role as members of Parliament to ensure that we stop using FIFO families as political footballs and that we be very careful about the language we use when we talk about FIFO families without any thought of the impact that our words can have on these families. Whatever other political imperatives there are around the issue, these families are an important part of our community; they do their best to be good parents—like the rest of us hopefully do—and to meet the significant costs of raising children. They deserve to be valued and supported, because we will see even more of them going into the future, not fewer.