About Scott Graham

I'm Scott Graham. I run Mineplex. Most consultancy About Us pages are written in the third person and read like a job application. I'd rather just tell you what I do, why, and where it came from.

The career

I started as a graduate mining engineer at BHP in 1992. 12 years of technical roles before I moved into mine and statutory management in 2004. Since then I've held COO, SSE, and GM positions across open-cut and underground operations, mostly Queensland coal, with metals and exploration along the way.

That's over 33 years in the industry, 20 of them as a respected SSE. I've sat in the SSE chair on good days and bad ones, and the bad ones taught me more about how mine safety systems actually work than any textbook did.

Why Mineplex

I started Mineplex in 2013 because I'd spent two decades watching the gap between what's written down and what actually happens on shift. Most safety systems I came across were technically compliant, well-documented, but not the thing keeping people safe.

The thing keeping people safe was usually a supervisor with judgement, a crew that trusted each other, and a manager who'd done the job before.

That's not an indictment of safety systems, they matter. It's an observation that the work of building one that actually gets used is harder than most consultancies acknowledge, and harder still to do from the outside.

I started Mineplex to do that work properly, with operators who want it done properly.

What I believe

A few things I've come to think after thirty years:

• The work of safety should not comeat the expense of safe work.
• Critical control management must be done FOR workers, not done TO them.
• Safe work can only be conducted by having supervisors who know their stuff, but know their people better. 
• Most incidents aren't a system failure. They're a system that worked exactly as designed, and the design was wrong.
• Risk competence is built, not trained in a classroom. There's a difference.
  

Qualifications, Certifications and Associations

• Bachelor of Mining Engineering (Honours), University of Wollongong
• Graduate Diploma of Management (Technology Management), Deakin University
• Graduate Certificate in Safety Science, Griffith University (in progress)
• TAE40116 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment
• Lead Auditor, OH&S Management Systems
• Notice of SSE — coal, metals, mines & quarries (Queensland)
• Limited Mine Manager Certificate of Competency (2000)
• Surface Mine Manager Certificate of Competency (2026)
• Ordinary Member, Mine Managers Association of Australia
• Member, AusIMM
• Associate, Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD)