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. Twelve years of technical roles before I moved into mine and statutory management in 2004. Since then I've held SSE, mine manager, and general manager positions across open-cut and underground operations, mostly Queensland coal, with metals and exploration along the way.

That's roughly thirty years in the industry, twenty of them as the person notified to the regulator. 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 2024 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, and 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:

• Compliance is the floor, not the goal. A site that's only  chasing audit ticks is one incident away from a very bad meeting.
• Critical control management lives or dies at the supervisor  level. If your CCs aren't usable on shift, the framework around  them is decoration.
• 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. There's a difference,  and most operators don't budget for the first one.



Outside the work

When I'm not consulting, I run Mirrabooka Pork — a free-range pig farm in northern New South Wales.

Same values, different problem:

• do the work properly, look after what you're responsible for,
• don't pretend the easy version is the same as the hard one.
  

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)
• Member, Mine Managers Association of Australia
• Member, AusIMM
• Member, Institute of Quarrying Australia (IQA)
• Associate, Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD)