consultation – Page 4 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Any OHS strategy needs to generate spillovers

Reading Safe Work Australia’s latest ten-year strategy forced me to think creatively.

SWA’s discussion of Persistent Challenges suggests controls that are almost all at the Administrative Control level – education, awareness, knowledge, training, understanding, support, communication and more. This is after admitting that:

“Injury and fatality rates have fallen significantly over the last decade. However, progress has slowed.”
Page 5

How can we increase the use of the Hierarchy of Controls (HoC) in determining safety-related policy? How can we get organisations to progress up the control hierarchy to show others that it is possible to prevent all of the incidents that everyone agrees are preventable? (Refer to WorkSafe Victoria’s Colin Radford for a recent example of this belief:

“Every workplace incident, every injury, every illness, every death is entirely unequivocally preventable.”)

Odd OHS comments from the Master Builders

Every year the Australian government releases a budget explaining what it plans to do over the next 12 months or longer. Business groups and trade unions often release documents submitted to the government, although whether the government requests this is unclear. Recently the Master Builders of Australia (MBA) sent through its submission (not yet publicly available). It has some interesting comments on the responsibility for occupational health and safety (OHS) and responsibility.

Engineered stone and deadly silica risks seem here to stay

So Australia did not ban the importation of engineered stone. The Heads of Workplace Safety Authorities (HWSA) have issued a Communique and a joint media release outlining their decision. It’s a political slap in the face to the trade unions who went hard on the ban.

Many organisations supported the call to ban the importation and use of engineered stone due to the unacceptable risk associated with cutting the product. Many were strident in need for the ban. Even the Federal Minister for Workplace Relations, Tony Burke, was talking tough on the morning of the critical meeting of the Heads of Workplace Safety Authorities. So what went wrong?

Legal Professional Privilege is the OHS equivalent of the Non-Disclosure Agreement

Pam Gurner-Hall is no stranger to this blog. Recently she appeared in an article by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) about access to information from South Australia’s occupational health and safety (OHS) regulator, SafeWorkSA.

SafeWorkSA has been under considerable scrutiny for the last few years. A “root and branch” review conducted by John Merritt is the latest inquiry. [Note: this article was written before the release of the Merritt report and the Government’s interim response last weekend. More on that report shortly]

Gurner-Hall’s concerns seem more about the government’s response to the inquiry and the application of Legal Professional Privilege (LPP). She is quoted saying:

Who’s to blame?

All occupational health and safety (OHS) advocates should be reading the work of Jordan Barab. His latest article on “blaming the workers” for their own incidents is a great example of his writing. The article also illustrates one of the things about OHS that really gets up the noses of employers – if we don’t blame the workers, we have to blame the employers. An Australian answer to the situation would be Yeah, Nah.

A fair dinkum fair go?

A New Work Relations Architecture is a radical book for Australia. Radical because its authors are proposing industrial relations reform, and Australia has had very little of this since Prime Minister John Howard‘s attempt with Workchoices in 2005. Radical also because it has taken inspiration from the Robens approach to occupational health and safety (OHS) laws.

The new “architecture” (thankfully, the cliche of “ecosystem” was not used) is described as:

Inspired by OHS but ignoring the shortcomings

A new Australian book has been structured around a “new work relations architecture“. Amazingly, a whole chapter is devoted to the role of occupational health and safety (OHS) in this new structure.

This chapter is written by prominent law academic Ron McCallum AO, offers a good summary of OHS laws and identifies the challenges to those laws in the near future, but its discussion is more reserved than it could be.

McCallum sticks to the suitability of the Robens model of OHS laws which McCallum describes as a type of “managed decentralism”. He highlights challenges to the laws and their operations that will be familiar to readers:

climate change
gig work
working from home

Category: consultation

Any OHS strategy needs to generate spillovers

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Odd OHS comments from the Master Builders

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Engineered stone and deadly silica risks seem here to stay

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Legal Professional Privilege is the OHS equivalent of the Non-Disclosure Agreement

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Who’s to blame?

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A fair dinkum fair go?

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Inspired by OHS but ignoring the shortcomings

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