We often operate in remote locations and sometimes close to Indigenous communities. We are committed to developing and maintaining relationships of mutual understanding and respect with the local and Indigenous communities, ensuring total protection of Indigenous cultural heritage on all our remote area work sites.
Employees are fundamental to BIS' success. For over a decade BIS has embraced Indigenous developmental opportunities.
27 May 2003. At the signing ceremony, BIS accepted an artwork from Pennoschea Little, a daughter of an Elder of the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi community. At the age of 14, Pennoschea was already a recognised artist.
In 1999, when BIS was still a division of Brambles, we developed our first official Indigenous community relationship with the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi communities in Roebourne, Western Australia. As a result, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation in 2003.
Both BIS and this local community benefit from this Memorandum of Understanding, as we have agreed to work together to promote business relationships, education, employment and training and to protect cultural heritage.
We recognise Indigenous peoples and include them in our operations. Indigenous people who live and work in their own land provide their communities with important social and economic benefits. In turn, this enables us to build a sustainable, diverse and reliable workforce. We have the ambition to grow the ratio of Indigenous employees in our total workforce to at least 10% by 2011.
We are taking the following initiatives to meet this target:
- Support national reconciliation through industrial engagement and partnerships with local Indigenous people.
- Increase our focus on sustainable relationships with Indigenous people and community representative organisations.
- Expand and develop Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) with the Indigenous representative organisations, including Land Councils & Aboriginal corporations.
- Engage in new opportunities that deliver commercial successes to our businesses and sustainable economic returns for Indigenous people.
- Maximise new business opportunities created through major resource development projects.
- Apply nationally ‘best practice’ Indigenous engagement model through employment, training and small business opportunities.
For more details on our strategy, read the BIS Indigenous Development Strategy.
BIS Indigenous development engagement model
We ensure that the engagement process with each Indigenous employee meets all quality expectations through applying our Indigenous engagement model:
Indigenous Engagement Model
