History

Australian Institute of Quarrying Education Foundation

On 11 May 1982 at a Special Meeting of Australian Divisional Committee of The Institute of Quarrying held in Adelaide, the following motion was put and adopted:-

‘that the Draft Constitution of the Australian Institute of Quarrying Education Foundation be approved’.

Thus 25 years ago began the story of one of the IQA’s greatest successes, one that has proved to be of great value not only to The Institute itself and its members but also to many others who work in the extractive and associated industries.

To celebrate this event, it is useful to provide a short record of why the organisation was created in the first place, and why it is a quite separate entity from The Institute of Quarrying Australia. In doing so, a great deal of what is written has been taken from a much larger dissertation on the history of the Foundation written by Past Secretary/Treasurer, Ken Fletcher.

The Institute of Quarrying

The development and growth of ‘institutes’ can be traced to the industrial revolution in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. Farm workers moved from rural work to the factories where opportunities existed to learn more skills, using their higher wages to obtain a better education for themselves and their children.

Some workers with similar interests joined together into groups, many of these receiving Royal recognition. Legislation was introduced providing conditions for their operation and approval was given for members to use titles and designatory letters that identified their standing in the fields in which they worked. These became ‘professional institutes’ – The Institute of Quarrying is one example.

The Institute of Quarrying began as a quarry manager’s association in Wales during the latter part of the Great War. A decade later, membership was extended to lower levels of supervision when it became obvious that the organisation would not survive if membership was restricted to managers.

Its prime focus was always on improving the levels of training and education of people in or wishing to enter the industry, and to encourage the setting of minimum standards for those in supervisory positions. However, it was not until the 1960s that a Diploma course in quarrying was developed at the Doncaster (UK) Technical College with the first students enrolling in 1967.

The Institute of Quarrying Australia

In the meantime, quarrying industry people in the Sydney region were meeting on a regular basis, and in 1953 the group was approved as the first Australian Branch. Others followed quickly and in 1968, they were brought together as a Division of The Institute of Quarrying UK. In 1994, the Australian members formed the Division into a public company (The Institute of Quarrying Australian Division), effectively separating it from the UK parent. Four years later, the company changed its name to The Institute of Quarrying Australia, and entered into an affiliation agreement with The Institute of Quarrying (UK).

Education of its members was still the basic aim of The Institute. In 1968, the Victorian Parliament passed the Extractive Industries Act that required quarry supervisory staff to be licensed in order to hold certain positions of responsibility. Box Hill TAFE were aware of the impending legislation and developed an on-campus course designed to meet the requirements for Supervisor, Quarry Manager and Superintendent levels of management.

Over the next several years, the management committee of The Institute of Quarrying Australian Division tried to convince other State Governments to provide educational courses in quarrying practice of sufficient standard to enable successful candidates from throughout Australia to meet The Institute’s requirements for its then Associate member grade. Eventually, this led (though not without many pitfalls on the way) to the development of an off-campus course through Box Hill TAFE, based on the on-campus version.

The problem was finance. The Australian Division offered to donate $10,000 towards the initial running of the course, but this would be insufficient unless other funding was available. An appeal was launched within the many companies in the industry, with the result that the target of $40,000 was reached early in 1982.

Australian Institute of Quarrying Education Foundation

The Education Foundation started in 1982 as a small organisation created to manage and use the funds raised from the appeal to industry to initiate development of the national off-campus course in quarrying. Since then, the Foundation has grown to one that now actively supports many and varied educational initiatives designed to provide benefits to the extractive industry and those employed in it.

The original capital held by the Foundation comprised not only those funds derived from the first appeal but subsequently monies donated from Institute State Branches. This latter money resulted from a second appeal for funds, necessary to fill the void caused by lack of State Government support. Extracting money from the Branches was difficult, for although they were part of an Australian Division, they maintained a façade of financial independence until incorporation in 1994. The second appeal raised $144,000 of which $26,000 was from Branch funds and $20,000 from the Australian Division.

Over time, the original capital has been supplemented by surpluses from the Institute’s annual conferences and payments from the publishers of Quarry magazine - until the last couple of years when The Institute decided to use these monies for its own purposes. Proceeds from the Annual Conference Explosives Auction and interest earned on funds invested now comprise the principal income.

The Foundation’s Council comprises the current President of The Institute of Quarrying Australia and the next five Past Presidents willing to serve. Two additional councillors can be appointed. The Foundation’s Councillors are charged with the responsibility of managing the funds in an efficient and effective manner, and to use them only as allowed by the organisation’s constitution. The Foundation’s charitable status demands the benefits that are derived from their use must be available to all in the industry and not restricted to The Institute or its members.

Growth & Management of Funds

In February 1988, the Division entered into a formal contract with the publishers of their fledgling industry magazine ‘Quarry’ that required them to pay a fee of $1,000 per issue, the money being directed to the Education Foundation. This occurred as some members believed the Division could be in breach of its tax exempt status if it entered the publishing business - as the Education Foundation’s constitution allowed it to do so, the Committee decided to pay the fees to the Foundation.

Following the incorporation of the Australian Division into a public company in 1994, earlier concerns about the Institute’s tax exempt situation were discounted, and in 1996 the income from the journal and its associated costs were returned to the Institute. During the period from 1988 to 1996, the Foundation received $105,000 in fees from the journal’s publisher.

In the late 80s, the Divisional Committee became concerned that member’s subscriptions were barely covering administration costs, whilst some branches were known to be holding substantial sums of money and still receiving financial support from the Division. Following the Division’s 1989 Annual Conference, the Queensland Branch donated $50,000 to the Foundation from the surplus it made from running the event.

A review was instituted by the Divisional Committee to determine what the branches were holding in their accounts and decided that unspent conference surpluses back to and including the 1980 conference and all surpluses in future, were to be donated to the Foundation. The arrangement was discontinued at the end of the 97/98 financial year, when the Institute decided to retain future surpluses for its own requirements.

From 1992, proceeds of the popular auction of explosives at The Institute’s annual conference have been donated to the Foundation. Dyno Wesfarmers donated the explosives until 1999 when they withdrew their support and UEE Explosives Australia generously agreed to continue the practice. In the nine years of the auction, over $250,000 has been raised by these auctions, with those in recent years including other products and articles donated by interested persons and organisations.
Other sources of income have been the donation of company’s Training Guarantee Levy in the early 90s and a few casual or occasional donors. The remainder of the funds which have now accumulated have arisen from asset management. Until 1997, this was done by the Foundation’s Councillors and Secretary/Treasurer, being maintained in trading bank term deposits, bank bonds or in bank owned subsidiary company’s debenture stock. It was a time of high inflation and interest rates, and it required little expertise or market knowledge to obtain a good return on monies invested.

However, the work took up a deal of the Secretary/Treasurer’s time and the Councillors looked at alternative means to obtain satisfactory levels of income and security from the accumulated funds which by then exceeded $1m. After reviewing a number of options, the Council decided to invest part of the accumulated funds in the Warakirri Charitable Fixed Interest Trust.

Warakirri Asset Management was a Melbourne based company and had developed three trusts - Australian Equities, Fixed Interest and Bonds - to provide a service for tax exempt charitable organisations, initially a number of Catholic schools. All were designed to provide a high degree of security with a reasonable level of earnings. As well, consideration was taken into account of the then major contributors’ conservative views, and investments were not made in shares of companies that were involved in uranium mining, manufacture and distribution of alcohol and tobacco, or in those associated with armaments and gaming.

In September 2000, the Bond trust was closed and the proportions in the remaining two funds changed to 85% Fixed Interest and 15% Australian Equities. This has progressively been changed over the last twelve months to nominally 50% Fixed Interest and 50% Australian Equities.

Foundation’s Financial Position

While direct operating costs of the Foundation are minimal – amounting to less than $10,000 per annum and consisting mainly of meeting costs, secretarial reimbursement and audit fees – the donations made for educational purposes fluctuates greatly. In attempting to maintain the Foundation’s corpus, the amount available for donations is approximately equal to the amount of interest and dividends received on term deposits and securities (currently about $460,000 invested) as well as the interest component of the Warakirri Trust Fund ($1,200,000 invested).

This amount has been of the order of $80,000 to $100,000 per annum over recent years, but due predominantly to the availability of Government funding for educational purposes related to the introduction of the new competency Training Packages, there has not been a great uptake of monies from the Foundation. However, since its inception, the Foundation has provided over three quarters of a million dollars towards various projects. Apart from a large number of small projects such as support for education and training seminars organised by individual Branches, the major projects supported have included:-

The Off-campus Course in Extractive Industries – between 1981 and 1987, the Foundation contributed $110,000 towards the development of the resources necessary to commence the Certificate of Technology (Quarrying). The Foundation contributed a further $75,000 between 1990 and 1994 towards the rewriting of the course materials for re-accreditation.
Awards – since 1987, the Foundation has provided funding for the annual Australia Award that recognised excellence in writing and publication of technical papers. In 1996, the Award was renamed the Alex Northover Award in recognition of his long and valuable service in the development and implementation of training and education in the industry. The Award is currently valued at $2,500, and has recently been altered to provide recognition for education attainment.
Assisted Private Scholarships – these were designed to provide mentor support and payment of costs associated with block release for students studying off-campus at Box Hill TAFE. Ten students were guided through the course at a cost of $78,000 between 1995 and 2000.
Education Officer – the nature and complexity involved in developing and maintaining the upgraded extractive industries course required an experienced educator. Until his transfer to the control of The Institute, the Foundation funded the work of the newly appointed Education Officer to the amount of $87,000 between 1994 and 1996. Recently, it has been agreed that the Foundation would once again fund this position.

Memorandum of Understanding & Charitable Status

To finally establish the current process whereby monies from the Foundation can be accessed, it is also necessary to be aware of some important events which have taken place in the last decade. Among these has been the decision to transfer all conference surpluses held by the Branches to a central account, a matter not taken lightly by the individual Branches at the time. While this has now occurred, it has provided problems in how to effectively ensure that Branches continue to fund their own education and training activities.

The solution to this was initially a Memorandum of Understanding between the IQA and the AIQ Education Foundation setting out procedures to be followed to obtain funds and conditions placed on their use. This partly overcame the long held belief that the Education Foundation was a wholly owned part of The Institute, and therefore there only to manage the funds and not determine how they were used.

Twelve months after this, the AIQ sought to obtain ‘charitable status’ in order to invest in equity trusts through Warakirri – it already was recognised as being income tax exempt. In order to obtain this ‘charitable status’, it was necessary to rescind the MOU which inferred that the Foundation’s resources were for the sole use of IQA members. This led to The Institute of Quarrying Australia becoming a Committee of the Foundation as provided for by Section 13 of the Foundation’s Constitution.

Essentially, the procedures set out under this system require that:-

The role of the Committee is to review, select and progress applications for funding from any person or group within the quarrying industry which met the Foundation’s stated objectives.
Those identified as meeting the criteria are to be advised to the Foundation together with the estimated costs of the proposals.
The Foundation keeps The Institute informed of the funds it expected to have available for acceptable projects and the total cost of approved programs would need to fall within those limits.
The Foundation is kept informed of progress made by the recipients in completing the projects.

This process has now been devolved to the Education Committee who continue to support the objectives of the Foundation as contained in the Constitution. These are:-

to establish and support national educational courses in quarrying and surface mining; and
to support advanced training for persons in technological fields related to quarrying exploration, development, production, organisation and management.

Applications must be related to these objectives – lectures and seminars of substantial educational and training value, publication of materials relating to the provision of education and training, establishment of scholarships for students engaged in quarrying or surface mining, granting of awards to encourage writing and publication of technical papers.

Current Outlook

The future for the Foundation looks bright. Total accumulated funds are now approaching $M3.5 with investments spread across a range of short, medium and long term instruments, each providing its own combination of appropriate interest rate and level of risk. Returns are such that relevant projects approved by the Foundation are capable of being financed largely from short term investments without any long term drain on the Foundation’s assets.