David v the Goliaths. Lone coal miner tackles BHP & co in Court over massive wage theft

Injured coal miner Simon Turner is suing BHP and four other workers who were not represented by legal counsel in the NSW Supreme Court in a historic wage theft case. Michael West reports.

This is official. The big court battle is starting! This isn’t just David versus Goliath. David versus Goliath and his goliath friends; A former coal miner from the Hunter Valley with no money and no lawyers is up against BHP, Mt Arthur Coal, Japanese leviathan Chandler Macleod, Hunter Valley Energy Coal and the government’s secret billion-dollar coal fund, Coal LSL.

In fact, this is a man who opposes the System of unions, corporations, and state and federal governments that Turner says conspired to underpay thousands of coal miners over the years. They were considered ‘casual’ workers in a series of agreements made by the CFMEU, BHP and labor hire companies.

Simon Turner, a coal miner who broke his back at the Mt Arthur coal mine years ago, has been given the green light by a NSW judge for his case to be heard in the NSW Supreme Court tomorrow, December 12. While Turner was in the hospital recovering from his back injury, he discovered that he was classified as an office worker, not even a miner.

Working below the poverty line

Living below the poverty line, he was paid $400 a week, whereas the Award had predicted $137,000 a year.

Turner is suing the giants on your behalfillegal record falsification, false evidence in court, and continued concealment of the employer’s identity; This is a conspiracy, a massive fraud perpetrated by BHP and its partners to underpay workers, including himself. 2.5 billion wage theft.

BHP’s massive wage theft revealed: whistleblower and coal miner

It’s not the first time he’s been in court. Turner had previously filed a class-action lawsuit, among other cases, but was betrayed by his own lawyers who failed to present critical evidence to the court. Everyone walked away. Very big.

And in this case, scheduled for a case management hearing tomorrow, BHP and its army of lawyers are attempting to conceal documents that have already been submitted to the Court.

They kept this news secret for years.

too big to fail

According to Turner, BHP and Chandler Macleod, one of its many labor hire companies, “willfully falsified my employee identity and lied under oath to the Australian Parliament, while ignoring Federal Court decisions, ATO laws, Commonwealth laws and their own legal obligations.”

If BHP and its partners fail to secure a closed court or have the matter quashed on a technicality, they are likely to claim that their actions were a mistake, ‘administrative oversight’. Turner told MWM that they “knowingly committed a crime against an injured coal miner who was homeless, suffering from chronic pain, severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder”; all the circumstances stem directly from your actions and constant cover-up.”

It claims that since 2015, they have collectively:

• invalid judicial findings, including the 2015 FWC Stanton matter and the 2017 Altobelli decision, both of which confirmed that Chandler Macleod Group Ltd (ABN 33 090 555 052) was my lawful employer under the 2010 Black Coal Mining Industry Award;
• I falsified Commonwealth records by retroactively changing my coal LSL employer ABN to Ready Workforce (ABN 54 088 288 037) – an organization that never held the mining contract, never paid me and never refunded any statutory contributions;
• Violations of Federal law, including but not limited to:
• Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) – s 137.1 (1)(c): Providing false or misleading information to a Commonwealth agency;
• Coal Industry Act 2001 (NSW) – ss 43–46: failure to properly maintain tax and employee data;
• Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) – ss 45, 550, 718: industrial means contraventions, additional liability and misrepresentation;
• Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) – ss 180–184: breach of duties of directors and officers; And
• Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (Cth) – ss 15 and 26: obligations to act ethically, legally and in good faith when managing public money and information.

“This deception is further compounded by the false evidence presented to the Senate Committee on Education and Employment Legislation on October 9, 2025. [two people] Individuals who deny under oath that Coal LSL has the authority to verify or alter employer data, despite written correspondence proving that they exercised precisely those powers when unlawfully changing my ABN in March 2025.”

It says these actions amount to misleading Parliament under privilege and obstruction of justice.

“The documentary record, including the ATO PAYG summaries, Mine Super data, Crix Affidavit (2016), the Altobelli decision (2017) and Coal LSL’s own emails, all prove that BHP and its co-conspirators knew full well who its employer was, “what contract applied and that this manipulation of records was deliberate.”

BHP covered up wage theft in the shadow of Christmas

MWM has reviewed the documents and they appear to be solid; Solid evidence showing BHP and its partners “defrauded a Commonwealth fund, misled regulators and inflicted years of financial and psychological harm on a worker who had already been injured on the job.”

Turner demanded to know in writing the legal basis for Coal LSL changing its ABN records after certified tax audits, why this change was made despite forensic findings, ATO data and legal evidence to the contrary; and why false statements were made to the Australian Senate under oath.

Let’s hope he finds out, because justice is due not only for Simon Turner but also for the thousands of other ordinary coal miners who have been robbed by the labor hire system.

Private tax collectors. The billion-dollar secret of the coal industry