FIFO mental health

Mark is a diesel fitter on an eight-days-on, six-days-off roster at a Pilbara iron ore mine, a routine he has kept for eleven years. Every second Thursday he flies out of Perth on a chartered jet that fills with high-visibility shirts before dawn; every second Wednesday he flies home. For eight days at a stretch he lives in a single-room donga — the demountable cabin that houses most of Western Australia's fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) workforce — on a site that is alcohol-free and, by any measure of physical safety, tightly run: fatigue-management rules, hard-hat inductions, a stop-work authority that lets any worker halt a job that looks unsafe. None of that, he says, prepared him for the loneliness of the second week of a swing, when the video calls home get shorter and the hardest thing to manage on a mine site turns out not to be the machinery. It is being over a thousand kilometres from anyone who would notice if he stopped answering his phone. Mark is not a statistic in a parliamentary report. But the report exists because tens of thousands of workers like him keep the resources boom running, and Western Australia has spent more than a decade arguing about what it owes them in return.

A boom that runs on the roster

Western Australia's resources sector runs on FIFO because the ore, gas and lithium are mostly a long way from where people want to live permanently. Industry estimates put the state's FIFO workforce at somewhere around 50,000 to 60,000 people (approx.), commuting to sites across the Pilbara, the Goldfields and the North West on rosters that typically swing between one and three weeks on site (Chamber of Minerals and Energy of WA, industry workforce estimates, various years). That scale, and the isolation built into the roster itself, is what prompted the first serious political scrutiny of FIFO mental health. In August 2014, under the then Barnett Coalition government, the Legislative Assembly asked its Education and Health Standing Committee to inquire into the mental health impacts of FIFO work. The committee tabled a discussion paper in November 2014 and its final report — The Impact of FIFO Work Practices on Mental Health — on 18 June 2015, after around 130 submissions and evidence that stigma, isolation from family and roster fatigue were driving elevated psychological distress on site (WA Parliament, Education and Health Standing Committee, 18-Jun-2015).

The 2015 report made 30 recommendations, including mental health literacy training for FIFO workers, peer-support programs, and a legislated duty of care over FIFO accommodation. Responding to it fell mostly to the government that followed: Labor, under Mark McGowan from March 2017. In April 2019 the state's safety regulator published Australia's first industry code of practice on FIFO mental health — Mentally Healthy Workplaces for Fly-In Fly-Out (FIFO) Workers in the Resources and Construction Sectors — built on the 2015 findings and an earlier industry-commissioned review (WorkSafe WA, Code of Practice, approved 2-Apr-2019). The Mental Awareness, Respect and Safety (MARS) program followed, an inter-agency effort spanning the safety regulator, the Mental Health Commission, the Equal Opportunity Commission and Lifeline WA, funding peer-support training and workplace culture programs across the sector. In March 2022 the state's harmonised Work Health and Safety Act 2020 and its Mines Regulations commenced, formally making psychosocial hazards — including fatigue, isolation and harassment — a risk employers have a legal duty to manage, not just a matter of guidance (Work Health and Safety Act 2020 (WA) and Work Health and Safety (Mines) Regulations 2022, commenced 31-Mar-2022). Roger Cook became Premier in June 2023, inheriting this architecture rather than building it from nothing; his government's task, examined below, has been to finish what earlier administrations of both colours started.

The evidence

The state's own research shows why that architecture was needed, and how far it still has to close the gap. In 2018 the WA Mental Health Commission, working with Curtin University's Centre for Transformative Work Design, published the most detailed FIFO mental health study yet undertaken in Australia, surveying more than 3,000 FIFO workers and family members. It found a third of FIFO workers — 33 per cent — reported high levels of psychological distress, against 17 per cent of the general working population, and that one in five FIFO workers had no on-site mental health facility to turn to, with one in ten having no access to an Employee Assistance Program at all (WA Mental Health Commission / Curtin CTWD, 2018).

The suicide data is harder to pin to Western Australia alone, and that gap is itself part of the story told below. The most rigorous published analysis — nineteen years of national coronial data, 2001 to 2019 — put the male mining-sector suicide rate at somewhere between 11 and 25 per 100,000 (approx.), rising over the period, while the researchers flagged that industry is often not recorded at all in coronial files, meaning the true toll for a FIFO-heavy state like Western Australia is probably undercounted rather than overstated (Safety and Health at Work, Jun-2023, analysing National Coronial Information System data). The 2015 parliamentary inquiry drew on the same kind of patchy data seven years earlier and reached a similar conclusion: nobody, including the government, could say with confidence how many FIFO workers had died by suicide, because no agency was systematically recording FIFO status in the record.

A code, not a rule

A code of practice is not the same thing as a directly enforceable regulation, and the distinction matters more than it sounds. Under the Work Health and Safety Act 2020, a code is admissible in court as evidence of what a reasonably prudent employer should have known and done, but an inspector cannot issue a breach notice for a code the way they can for a regulation. Employers may reach "an equivalent or higher standard" by another method — defensible in principle, since it lets an operator design its own psychosocial risk plan rather than follow a single checklist — but in practice it means the primary lever the state chose for FIFO mental health has always depended on employers choosing to use it well.

Six years is a long time for that lever to sit unreviewed. The 2019 code remained, as at this masthead's most recent check, the current operative document, last formally updated in February 2025 (WorkSafe WA, Code of Practice register). By 2022 the government's own "Enough is Enough" response had already flagged that the FIFO code needed review; the Minister for Industrial Relations formally asked the Mining and Petroleum Advisory Committee to undertake it (WA Government response to 'Enough is Enough', 21-Sep-2022). Three years on, WorkSafe WA's May 2025 progress report still describes that review as requested rather than completed. A code written before the 2022 WHS reforms and before "Enough is Enough" was still the state's operative rulebook on FIFO mental health six years after publication — a long time for a document to sit unrefreshed in an industry the regulator itself has repeatedly called urgent.

A code of practice can describe a mentally healthy workplace. On its own, it cannot build one.

The workforce data suggests the gap is not merely bureaucratic. Access to on-site mental health support and Employee Assistance Programs — the exact deficits the 2018 Mental Health Commission study identified — was not made mandatory by the 2019 code; it recommends a risk-management process, not a minimum staffing ratio for mental health support or a guaranteed EAP place for every worker. No public WA data published since 2018 shows whether that one-in-five and one-in-ten gap has closed, because no agency has repeated the survey at the same scale. A government that commissions the country's most detailed FIFO mental health study, in 2018, and then does not repeat it, is choosing not to find out whether its own code is working.

Enough is enough, again

The workplace-culture problem the 2015 inquiry described in general terms became sharply specific in 2022. The Community Development and Justice Standing Committee's inquiry into sexual harassment against women in the FIFO mining industry, tabled as Enough is Enough on 23 June 2022, made 79 findings and 24 recommendations after hearing that around 74 per cent of women working in WA mining had experienced sexual harassment in the preceding five years (approx.), conduct the committee described as severe, systemic and, in evidence repeated to it, "an open secret" on many sites (WA Parliament, Community Development and Justice Standing Committee, 'Enough is Enough', 23-Jun-2022). The report matters to a mental health topic because the two problems share causes: isolation, closed accommodation, and a culture that discourages complaint are risk factors the 2015 inquiry itself named, and "Enough is Enough" showed those same conditions had also let harassment and assault go unaddressed for years.

The government's formal response, tabled 21 September 2022, accepted or accepted-in-principle most recommendations within its own responsibility, and declined to pursue dedicated new legislation, judging existing equal opportunity and work health and safety law sufficient if properly enforced (WA Government response to 'Enough is Enough', 21-Sep-2022). By May 2025, under the Cook government, WorkSafe WA's final progress report described the great majority of its own actions as complete or embedded in ordinary operating practice — funding for the Sexual Assault Resource Centre and Circle Green Community Legal to support victims, psychosocial-hazard training for every WorkSafe mines inspector, and a data system intended to let the regulator finally track harassment reports systematically (WorkSafe WA, 'Enough is Enough' Final Progress Report, May-2025). That is a genuine body of work, and much of it is what the 2022 committee asked for.

It is also, on its own terms, a report the government wrote about itself. No independent body — not the Auditor General, not an external reviewer — has yet audited whether harassment rates on WA mine sites have actually fallen since 2022, as distinct from whether the government's own list of promised actions has been ticked off. WorkSafe's new data system is designed to make that kind of independent tracking possible in future; it is not yet evidence that the underlying problem it was built to measure has shrunk. Marking your own homework as complete is not the same claim as showing the number the homework was meant to move.