Dr Shay Dougall Details

 

I am (1) a host farmer, (2) a WHS professional, (3) a researcher, (4) an active research participant (have been a participant in various published Unconventional Gas (UG) research articles) and, finally, (5) an advocate. As an advocate, I have engaged directly in the UG regulatory framework and directly supported and advocated for over 60 other host farmers located within the Darling Downs and Maranoa, which is the most intensive UG mining area in Queensland and so far in Australia.

I am acutely aware of the lived experience of the host farmer in navigating the regulatory arrangements that permit the co-location of the UG industry in their workplace and the myriad of problems that result. These include negative impacts on individual host farmers’ physical and psychosocial health and suboptimal work conditions, introducing new hazards and compounding existing ones and contributing to farming workplace incidents.

WHS Professional

As a WHS Professional, my expertise has matured over a 25 year work experience that started upon my graduation with a Bachelor of Behavioural Science, Griffith University, Queensland. After graduating in 1994, I took up a WHS position with an energy development company that innovatively captured methane gas from landfills and generated electricity that was sold to the electricity grid in Australia, the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK). In 2001, I established my own health safety and environment (HSE) consulting firm. I continued consulting on gas-to-energy projects and providing HSE advice for a wide range of other businesses, including those involved in wind generation, plastics manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, fabrication and finally, the construction phases of underground coal gasification and coal seam gas extraction projects (both forms of UG) on the Darling Downs, near Chinchilla, Queensland.

In 2005, I moved to Chinchilla, married into a local farming family, and developed friendships with other local farming families. At precisely this time, the coal seam gas industry (UG) and the town of Chinchilla were starting to expand. Because of my training and experience, I was particularly well-placed to observe the psychosocial impacts these changes had on my family, friends, and community.

Advocate

During these years, I also began to support host farmers using my WHS professional experience in an advocacy role. This work included reviewing legislative requirements, documentation from environmental authorities, and UG company-farming contracts to identify issues for the farmers and communicate gaps and expectations to the UG companies on behalf of individual host farmers.

Research Participant

Since 2010, the Western Darling Downs region has been subject to significant research that I frequently participated in. My experience with these projects and my positionality, gave me a distinctive insight. Particularly significant was my experience and the limitations of being a subject of a research project rather than a partner in its design and delivery. Particularly problematic from my viewpoint was an observation about how the lived workplace experiences of host farmers remained invisible in both the methods and theoretical approaches used by the broader research community. I also felt that the priorities of the community were subjugated, at times, by those of the researcher and funding agency.

Researcher

In 2019, I completed and published my Master of Occupational Health, Safety and Environmental Management thesis (Australian Catholic University) (Dougall, 2019). This research project, for the first time, presented the UG/ host farmer and the WHS interface. One of the risks identified in my Masters research project was the workplace psychosocial risks for host farmers, and this missing element led to this Ph.D. research.

During 2019-2021, I also assisted Dr. McCarron in publishing a book chapter entitled An overview of unconventional gas extraction in Australia – the first decade (McCarron & Dougall, 2021). This work chronicles the development of the UG industry in Australia and the multidimensional challenges across the spectrum for the government, domestic end users, and those required to host the burgeoning export industry. It is through my cumulative, embedded experiences that the research gap which my Phd thesis addresses was identified.

My PhD research argues that to truly address the unsatisfactory outcomes borne by host farmers, because of the UG industry co-location in their workplaces, the specific interface of UG-host farmer-WHS needs to be formalised and tools to engage in this space needs to be designed and standardised. Not just in terms of future research and changes to government policy, but as an open-source tool that farmers can use themselves to communicate what until now has been camouflaged. My research filled this gap.

The research shows, the UG co-location regulations written and enacted, render the host farmer with a co-located industry in their workplace, exposed to hazards and risks via the physical and commercial interface with the UG industry. These hazards and risks fall outside of the co-location regulations, and are without a clearly defined path for prevention or remedy or to jurisdictional support from Queensland’s WHS legislation.

Being solutions focused, my research also presents a toolkit that, if implemented as a part of the co-location arrangements, could provide an ongoing means to integrate host farmers and their WHS statutory rights into the UG regulatory framework and contractual and physical interface.
The toolkit can be applied by host farmers and advocates in the day-to-day engagement with the UG industry and governance that will give power to their voices. Its utility in this application is supported by my own experience advocating for host farmers over the last 10 years. The Scorecard could be used to undertake a targeted assessment and improvement of the current regulatory environment that is timely and urgent.

My research

Masters Thesis : Workplace health and safety (WHS) implications for farmers hosting unconventional gas (UG) exploration & production

Book Chapter :  McCarron, G., & Dougall, S. (2021). An overview of unconventional gas extraction in Australia – the first decade. In J. F. Stolz, Griffin, W.M., and Bain, D.J. (Ed.), Environmental Impacts from the Development of Unconventional Oil and Gas Reserves. Cambridge University Press.

PhD Thesis : Host Farmers: Silence at the centre of the unconventional gas people-place-law nexus

Future Research

My positioning concerning research places my approach within the social science category of ‘insider’ research. My approach also draws on some elements and shares the benefits of participatory action research . However, this arises from my own personal and professional immersion and insider perspective of the topic, rather than through more typical fieldwork to actively gather host farmer data. My research enjoys the advantages of participatory action research by enabling excluded people to release the locked-up assets of their knowledge and experience. My research also challenges outside expert knowledge, which speaks about action without actually engaging in action, and seeks out ‘missing communities’ in community-based research processes so that the practical and absent knowledge of the missing may inform these. For my research, I use this approach as an insider to honour the practice and local knowledge of the host farmer as a fundamentally important source of transformative data, in the context of UG-farm impacts. An engaged participatory action research approach also addresses the overtly top-down decision-making and research approaches that have characterised much research in this field and thus permits silenced people to articulate their criticisms and advocate for policy change with powerful agency.

I hope to continue in my advocacy role and assist farmers and their advocates in applying the toolkit. I also hope to continue my research in this newly revealed interface and have the toolkit used to make these essential changes to UG governance arrangements and promote dialogue and progress.