Interestingly though, the two issues are interlinked. Both relate to people and organisational culture.

BHP Billiton announced last year that it would be moving to 50:50 gender diversity by 2025. It is also one of the miners moving towards heavily autonomous operations.

Barrick Gold is another. Its senior director innovation Andrew Scott said the company’s board challenged its management to deliver an autonomous mine within three years.

Scott said while there were a lot of technical issues around that, a large number of them were people related.

“One of the things we want to try and do is change the culture of the company,” he said.

The issue, automation poses, is not the loss of jobs, although it is clear some roles will go. As Hopwood, a UK-born Melbournian who these days lives in Canada, pointed out: “If you went back 100 years, 10% of all the jobs were related to horses”.

The challenge will be finding talented young people with the right skill sets and attracting them to the mining industry.

Hopwood believes that is one of the biggest challenges facing miners.

He has come to Perth as part of the annual conference Deloitte holds for its mining team. 

The theme of this year’s conference is The Future of Mining Now.

“Given where we are, we’re not getting graduates through the door fast enough,” he said.

Deloitte national mining leader Nicki Ivory said that was one of the biggest challenges facing mining.

“How do we attract tech-savvy trained people when there are sexier places in the world?” she asked.

After all, these graduates are considering options in New York, London, Sydney, Melbourne or Silicon Valley. It is a big ask to get them to consider moving to the Bowen Basin or the Pilbara in the height of an Australian summer or into northern Canada in the winter.

There is also a benefit to removing people from front line mining roles: safety.

“This is making things safer,” Ivory said.

“It’s about making the making the industry value chain better and making the industry safer.”

Ivory said the move towards the digital mine would not happen overnight but the value that came from digitisation was driving it.

“It is being enabled by the cost of technology coming down,” she said.

“Sensors are becoming so cheap. You can measure what a machine is doing and predict what might happen to it. The kind of analytics you can do now is incredible.”