Professor Marcus Cattani recently joined The University of Queensland’s Sustainable Minerals Institute as a professorial research fellow at SMI’s Minerals Industry Safety and Health Centre (MISHC). Here he talks about his ambition to use what he’s learnt in the mining industry to make work safer for all.
What’s the price tag of work-related injuries?
In 2025, there were 188 workplace deaths and over 145,000 serious injuries in Australia. The Australian government’s safety agency estimated the cost of work-related injuries at $60 billion per year, and when other factors are included, the bill could be about $80 billion a year.
For decades, the mining industry’s safety performance was generally pretty poor. My first job in the mining industry was in 2001 and since then the mining industry has invested in the prevention of injuries and built a really good culture of managing risk to an acceptable level, resulting in significantly reduced workplace fatalities.
But if you work for a small business (up to 200 employees), particularly on a farm or as a contractor, measures to prevent fatalities, like leadership commitment and safety management systems, are not at the same level.
We need the outcomes achieved in the mining sector, and to do that we need to customise the injury prevention tools so they are suitable for small businesses. Given they often face high costs in designing and implementing safe systems of work, this is quite a challenge!
What’s needed to make change happen?
Leadership is critical: leaders need to understand their contribution to improving safety. Legal due diligence requirements mean that leaders need to know what is going on in their business and work to fix issues. There are many smaller organisations who have not started to invest in preventing harm or understand the importance of due diligence, leadership commitment and safety management systems
A key component of that is toleration of risk. Toleration of risk is the level of risk at which someone changes their behaviour. For example, if an organisation will not tolerate another fatality, they need to do something about the contributing factors. That’s why it is so important to translate this into tools a farmer or any small business owner can use! We also need to talk to them in jargon-free language to get across that some of their activities have a high injury risk and see how we can improve.
I think there is good opportunity to work with insurers and banks who provide services to small business. If our researchers develop an injury risk management process, then both the small businesses and the insurers benefit, because it gives confidence to the insurers that risk is being actively managed. As a result, they will be able to offer cheaper premiums.
How does coming to the Sustainable Minerals Institute help in tackling these research challenges?
My new role is focusing on research, which is a dream job for me! To start with I will be continuing my work investigating how to create effective leaders, people who want to invest in preventing harm, and who know how to do it. There is an excellent team in MISHC who have many years experience in preventing harm, so I will parner with Professor Maureen Hassall and the whole MISHC team.
I am looking forward to collaborating with my new team.
What sparked your passion for safety research?
It was a passion to prevent harm and an inquiring mind that led me to a research role. I was lucky enough to find a course which suited my interest in environmental matters, and studied environmental analysis and monitoring. One of the electives was occupational hygiene which focuses on how workplaces affect people’s health. I did this thing I’d never heard of and it turned out I loved it! After three months in Australia on a work placement, I went back to the UK and did a Master of Science in Occupational Hygiene at the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh, under Professor John Cherrie.
That’s really where my passion for research came from. I did a major research project looking at how organisations used hazardous substances, especially in roles that weren't even seen as being high risk like hairdressers or antique furniture restorers. I found a lot of risk-taking and lack of knowledge.
I learned to draw cartoons, and I came up with this character that was based on John Cherrie and printed off little badges and made these little pamphlets and then I went out and gave it to these people. This was serious research but done in a way that would appeal to people. A couple of weeks later I went back and asked them how they perceived that risk with the new information.
At one family-owned business, they used a chemical which I recognised as a carcinogen to clean glassware. The owner of the business was teaching his son how to clean the glassware. I suggested they change the chemical to something harmless, as it could cause cancer. The father said his father had died of testicular cancer and he himself had it. We researched alternatives and replaced the hazardous chemical with a safe orange-peel-based solvent. Making a difference to people's lives is a great outcome.
