Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Clinton Kent, and I am the Mining Superintendent at Bengalla Mine. My role is to oversee mining activities and ensure we align with our safety standards, production plans and budget. My role involves the leadership approximately 400 employees/contractors with a key focus on ensuring each and every person goes home safely each day, that we deliver high quality work and maintain/support Bengalla’s strong culture ensuring we treat people as we would like to be treated ourselves.

When did you start in the mining industry and what was your first job?

I started mining for BHP in Central Queensland in 1996. My first job was as a Junior Production Employee firstly in field maintenance and working my way through survey, CHPP coal mining and pre-strip operations.

How different is your job now to what you wanted to be when you were a kid?

When I was younger, I wanted to join the Australian Army as a Combat Engineer, so similar in some ways!

What’s a usual day at work entail?

It usually starts early, at about 5am to catch the offgoing shift reviewing the last 24-hour results of how we performed relative to our plan on safety and production and make sure we put in place corrective actions as needed to improve for the next 24 hours. It also involves engagement with the Mine Technical teams on a longer term time horizon to ensure that Bengalla delivers on our mission of Safe, Productive, Profitable coal with strong community engagement and market presence and guide our operations and lead our people so that we deliver our Plan.

I also engage directly with our leaders and people around any coaching/mentoring opportunities to ensure we improve and continue to do so over time.

What’s the best thing about your job?

Seeing what is possible when a team works together! Seeing the team absolutely hum is the best part of the job!

The worst thing?

It goes without saying, having someone in our team hurt or injured.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

Learning how to balance work and home life.

What’s something about your job that would surprise people to know?

The biggest part of my job involves leading people, delivering outcomes through our people and doing that while instilling a positive can do attitude. You get absolutely no time for yourself, but that’s a good thing.

What’s your best advice for people about to enter the industry?

Effort is free!! Bring a positive can-do attitude. What you may lack in knowledge or expertise you can make up with effort, don’t stop, turn up every day, be a genuine human being, don’t be entitled and work hard. If you do that you will get everything you want and more and you will make a difference to your team, your organisation, your community and your country.

The mining industry gets more than its fair share of criticism. What is your view of our industry and the impact it has?

Mining has helped me support my family and achieve all our goals and dreams. I am a second generation miner and owe everything I have, everything I have done and everything I’ve become to mining.

I believe that we can improve the world with technology to source cleaner energy however this will not happen until we all start working together to make this happen. Coal is still required for many years to provide a principal source of energy while we trial and adapt to viable alternatives.

We need mature leadership that can make fact-based decisions on our future and a mature country that is not driven by unrealistic expectations.