Fly-In Fly-Out: How WA's Mining Boom Is Hollowing Out Regional Communities

The Policy Nobody Voted For

Western Australia's mining industry employs more than 130,000 people - and the majority of them never actually live in the regions where they work. Instead, they fly in from Perth, Brisbane, or Sydney for two or three weeks at a time, work punishing rosters, then fly home. This is the fly-in fly-out (FIFO) model, and it has become the dominant labour arrangement for major resource projects across the Pilbara, Goldfields, and Mid West.

What's less discussed is that this model didn't emerge naturally. It was actively enabled and encouraged by government policy - through tax concessions, infrastructure decisions, and planning approvals that made it easier for mining companies to house workers in remote camps than to invest in regional towns.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The scale is significant. At the height of the mining boom, FIFO workers made up more than half the workforce at many Pilbara operations. Towns like Newman, Tom Price, and Karratha watched their populations stagnate or decline even as nearby mine sites employed thousands of people.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Karratha had its population projected to reach 50,000 by the mid-2010s under optimistic state government forecasts. It sits at around 16,000 today.
• The WA Government spent over $2.2 billion on the Pilbara Cities initiative - a Barnett-era program designed to build liveable regional cities. That investment has delivered mixed results at best, with housing costs remaining volatile and services thin.
• A 2013 Senate inquiry found that some remote FIFO operations had zero permanent residents living locally, functioning entirely as extraction operations with no community footprint whatsoever.
• Regional hospitals, schools, and emergency services in WA's north are chronically underfunded relative to need - in part because official population counts don't capture FIFO workers who use services but aren't counted as residents.

Who Benefits - and Who Pays

The FIFO model suits mining companies for straightforward reasons: it gives them a flexible, controllable workforce without the obligation to fund schools, hospitals, roads, or housing in regional towns. Workers can be hired and shed as commodity prices fluctuate. There's no messy entanglement with local communities.

The companies that benefit most include BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue, and Woodside - all of which have recorded tens of billions in annual revenue from WA operations while maintaining relatively modest regional footprints.

The people who pay the price are harder to see in a budget spreadsheet:

• Regional business owners who can't build a customer base when the workforce disappears every fortnight
• FIFO workers themselves, who face documented higher rates of depression, anxiety, relationship breakdown, and suicide. The 2015 WA State Coroner's report into the deaths of FIFO workers found alarming mental health outcomes and called for urgent reform
• Families left behind in Perth, managing households and children as single-parent units for weeks at a time
• Regional towns that receive none of the tax revenue, infrastructure investment, or population density needed to sustain services

Why Has This Been Allowed to Continue?

Both major parties deserve scrutiny here.

The Liberal-National government under Colin Barnett championed the Pilbara Cities vision but simultaneously approved major FIFO expansions and did nothing to restrict the camp-based model. The rhetoric was about regional investment; the reality was that policy settings consistently favoured corporate flexibility.

The Labor government under Mark McGowan - and now Roger Cook - has collected record mining royalties (WA's royalty income hit $13.8 billion in 2022-23) while doing relatively little to mandate genuine regional investment as a condition of mining approvals. There have been reviews, reports, and recommendations. There has been far less action.

The reason is simple: mining royalties fund WA's budget, mining companies fund political donations across both sides, and FIFO workers are dispersed across metropolitan electorates where their votes don't aggregate into regional political pressure. The communities most affected - small regional towns - have little electoral weight.

What Reform Would Actually Look Like

The 2012 House of Representatives inquiry into FIFO work practices made 15 recommendations. The 2015 WA Coroner made further recommendations. Various state government reviews have followed.

Reforms that have been proposed - and largely ignored - include:

• Local content requirements mandating a percentage of a project's workforce live permanently in the region
• Infrastructure levies on camp-based accommodation that fund regional services
• Mental health support obligations as a condition of remote project approvals
• Royalty hypothecation - directing a fixed proportion of mining royalties to the specific regions where extraction occurs

None of these are radical. Most have broad public support when polled. They have not been implemented in any meaningful way.

This Is Exactly Why Direct Democracy Matters

The FIFO problem is a case study in how representative democracy fails when the interests of concentrated corporate power diverge from the interests of dispersed communities. Mining companies have resources, access, and political relationships. Regional towns have neither.

If Australians - or even Western Australians - were directly asked whether mining companies should be required to support the communities where they operate, the answer would almost certainly be yes. If they were asked whether record royalty revenues should fund the towns those royalties came from, the answer would almost certainly be yes.

But nobody has been asked. That's the point.

Direct Democracy believes you should have a real say on policies like this - not once every four years through a party that has already made its deals, but directly, on the issues that matter.

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Want to help shape what a genuine regional investment policy should look like? [Take our policy quiz](https://directdemocracy.com.au/quiz) to see where you stand, or [join the party](https://directdemocracy.com.au/join) and vote directly on the policies we take to parliament. Regional Australians deserve better than being collateral damage in someone else's profit model.