Giving back
Through our volunteering programs, all team members have the opportunity to spend one full day or two half-days per year volunteering, helping with activities like preparing nutritious meals for community members in need, local environmental clean-up days, fundraising drives and more. We’re also proud to provide workplace giving and a range of community programs that offer donations to causes our people regularly volunteer with or support outside of work – from memorial walks to local sports clubs, foodbanks to rural fire brigades, mental health organisations to marine rescue squads, local sporting clubs to fundraising walks and more.
Over the years our teams have helped fundraise for organisations including Beyond Blue, local SES brigades and supported our long-term friends at Kids Under Cover.
As part of our broader Group, we’re proud to support the Royal Flying Doctor Service and join many local events important to our Queensland and Northern Territory communities each year.
Our volunteers
Each year, around 6 million Aussies spend time volunteering in their local community, contributing almost 600 million hours of unpaid community support.
Here we share the stories of some of the incredibly generous and giving people working at Zinfra.
Brad Hoare – Appin Fire Brigade, NSW
In 2012, Zinfra Industrial & Commercial Metering Supervisor Brad joined the NSW Rural Fire Service’s Appin Fire Brigade after relocating to the area.
Keen to learn more about firefighting duties and give back to his local community, Brad is now a Senior Deputy Captain and Training Officer – and is passionate about supporting people during their time of need and assisting with future preparation strategies.
Impressively, Brad also supports the NSW RFS Southern Highlands District as a Remote Area Operator and is an Aviation Rescue Crewman for the State Aviation Unit who assist with activities ranging from reconnaissance to re-supply and search and rescue.
Brad’s advice to anyone considering volunteering is: “If you have the time to give, then give it; you won’t regret it. When you enjoy doing something, it really does feel good to give back.”
Zinfra Community Link Program - Provided Brad and Appin Brigade funding to purchase materials and resources for their junior firefighter’s program and equipment for a new fire truck.
Mick Schembri – Rowsley Fire Brigade, VIC
50km west of Melbourne lies the small farming area of Rowsley, where Zinfra Team Leader Field SCADA & Communications Mick acts as 2nd Lieutenant of Rowsley Fire Brigade.
As a Country Fire Authority (CFA) volunteer since 2019, Mick’s role involves supporting crew training and providing primary firefighting coverage – both for bushfires and structural fires – for people living across Rowsley Valley and its surrounding areas.
Over the last two years, Mick’s proud to have seen Rowsley’s volunteer numbers double, and of the way the team have worked through various restrictions to safely keep up with required training and improve their member’s skillsets and qualifications.
Mick’s advice for anyone looking to volunteer locally is to “Find something you are interested in and sign up! Consider things outside your comfort zone, as you may surprise yourself with what you can achieve.”
Community Link Program - Provided the Rowsley crew with funding for a mobile app to improve information around and communications between crews during call outs.
Modern Slavery
We are opposed to all forms of modern slavery and forced labour in our industry, our business operations, and in the operations of our suppliers. We are committed to ensuring that modern slavery is not present within our business and supply chains. We have a zero-tolerance approach to modern slavery and we are committed to tackling modern slavery throughout our supply chains, consistent with our disclosure obligations under the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth).
As an industry, we actively participated in an energy industry-wide action group to identify opportunities to integrate sustainable procurement procedures and implement a human rights compliance program
Launch of our fourth Modern Slavery Statement
Deepening our understanding of potential modern slavery risks
Today, we released our Modern Slavery Statement 2024, outlining steps we’ve taken to deepen our understanding as well as actions to assess and address modern slavery risks.
Modern slavery is an overarching term for situations involving forced labour, illegal forms of child labour, human trafficking, debt bondage, deceptive recruiting for labour, and exploitation of minimum wage requirements.
As a large infrastructure business, while risks of modern slavery in our Australian-based operations remain low, our supply chains are globally connected. This means potential risks sit at the lower levels of our supplier chain tiers, which makes them more difficult to assess and map.
To help us better understand and manage these risks, in 2023, we partnered on a pilot program with Fair Supply which provided us access to an ESG risk management and compliance platform with reporting data across industries and countries to help identify, mitigate and manage modern slavery and associated risks.
As we expand our work with Fair Supply in 2024, it will help provide us with more rigour in understanding and managing our modern slavery risk in complex supply chains.
In addition to this crucial partnership, 2023 saw us:
use updated modern slavery risk ratings in the Informed 365 platform to better understand modern slavery hotspots for the energy sector, and improve our internal risk monitoring
update our Code of Conduct to reflect our commitment to mitigating modern slavery risks, and provide information and training to our teams
collaborate with industry peers through the Energy Procurement Supply Association to better understand and map modern slavery risk in the sector, including refining and standardising supplier assessment questionnaires.
In addition, 750 of our suppliers completed modern slavery assessment questionnaires and we completed 1,617 sanction checks across our supplier base.
A copy of our Modern Slavery Statement 2024 is available HERE.
