Ask an operator how they manage contracting companies and you will hear about inductions, tickets and medicals. All about people.
Then a float arrives with an excavator that is three weeks overdue for a service, and a cleared operator stands next to it while somebody works out what to do.
Plant is the other half of the problem, and it is the half that is usually managed by exception.
Why it stopped being optional
Since 1 June 2026, Queensland operators have had to demonstrate a systematic, verifiable approach to their critical controls under the Resources Safety and Health Legislation Amendment Act 2024.
Work through what that means for equipment. A critical control is performed by a person, usually using plant. The control is only genuinely in place if the person is competent and the machine is fit for the task.
On a contracting company-heavy site, a large share of that plant belongs to contracting companies. So verifying your critical controls means verifying contracting company equipment — not accepting that it was verified somewhere else.
That is a change in kind, not degree. Collecting a compliance plate photograph at the gate is not a systematic, verifiable approach to anything.
What is worth requiring
Not everything. A requirement list nobody can maintain gets met on paper, which is worse than a shorter list met properly.
The ones that earn their place:
Identification. Asset ID, make, model, serial or plant number. Sounds trivial; it is the thing that makes every other record attachable to a specific machine rather than to "the 30-tonner".
Service currency against the manufacturer's intervals. With a date, not a statement that servicing is up to date. The date is what makes it checkable.
Inspections and certifications, dated. Whatever the class of plant requires — and the date matters for the same reason.
Fitment specific to your site. Fire suppression, isolation, lighting, proximity detection, ROPS and FOPS as applicable, reversing and visibility aids. This is the category that varies most between operators and is documented least, which is why it is the most common cause of a machine being turned around.
Registration where it applies, including plant that must be registered by design or item.
Who is authorised to operate it, which is the join between your plant requirements and your competency requirements and is almost always maintained separately from both.
The two failures worth designing out
The requirement that lives in an email. Fitment requirements in particular tend to arrive from a different part of the organisation than the worker requirements do — engineering rather than HSE — and reach the contracting company as an attachment eighteen months ago.
If a contracting company cannot find your plant requirements in one place, they are not going to meet them consistently, and the first time anybody discovers the gap is at your laydown.
Write them down per work area, in the same place as the worker requirements. It is a morning's work and it removes a recurring category of failure entirely.
The check that only happens at the gate. If the first assessment of a machine happens when it is on a float outside your site, then every failure costs a mobilisation. The same check, performed against a record a week earlier, costs a phone call.
That is the entire argument for holding contracting company plant details in advance rather than inspecting on arrival. Inspection at the gate is still worth doing — it catches what a record cannot — but it should be confirming something you already believe, not discovering it.
The pairing is what you are actually assessing
Worth stating plainly because it changes how the records should be shaped.
Your site does not assess a person and separately assess a machine. It assesses this person, operating this machine, doing this task.
If the competency records and the plant records live in two systems, somebody reassembles that pairing by hand every time it is needed — and in practice, "every time it is needed" quietly becomes "when somebody asks", which is after an incident.
A cleared operator with an overdue machine is a stopped job. So is a serviced machine with an operator who has no verification on that class. The two failures cost the same and are usually tracked by different people.
What to ask a contracting company
One question, and how quickly they answer tells you most of what you need:
Show me one machine's record — identifiers, service currency, inspections, certifications, and what it is assigned to right now.
If it comes from the same place as their worker records, they can maintain what you are asking for.
If it comes from a maintenance system, a whiteboard and somebody's phone, they cannot — not reliably, not at scale, and not on the morning you need it. That does not mean you should not engage them. It means you have just learned exactly where your own checking has to be, and it is not where your current process is looking.
