Rio Tinto chairman fears global blowback from a No vote
London | A No vote in the Voice referendum could have global reputational repercussions for Australia, Rio Tinto chairman Dominic Barton has warned.
“I hope it won’t, but I worry about it,” he told a Financial Times mining summit in London on Friday.
“The people will decide, and employees will decide” the referendum outcome, he said. But “I think there will be reflections on what’s happening, and where it is”.
A still from a video of archaeological digs in the caves at Juukan gorge in 2015. PKKP Aboriginal Corporation
Mr Barton said Rio Tinto’s focus would be on continuing to maintain or develop its own advisory processes with Indigenous Australians.
“It’s their land, and how we’re operating is something we’ll just continue to do. We have an advisory group that’s very helpful to us, that was set up after the Juukan Gorge situation,” he said, referring to the company’s destruction of several sacred Aboriginal sites in the Pilbara in May 2020.
“That has been very helpful to us not just in building better relationships, but also in terms of how we think about social licence more broadly.”
Rio Tinto chairman Dominic Barton. Sanghee Liu
Mr Barton revealed that Rio Tinto would in 2024 publicly release a scheduled second report into its workplace culture by Elizabeth Broderick, a United Nations special rapporteur on human rights.
“Liz is going to come back and in 2024 that report will be public again,” Mr Barton said. “That makes some of us nervous… we will be held to account in terms of where that is.”
Ms Broderick, a former sex discrimination commissioner, was mandated to write a report in 2021 after a pair of parliamentary inquiries into sexual harassment and the Juukan Gorge scandal uncovered systemic flaws in Rio Tinto’s
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