Flash Sale – 50% Discount

It’s the end of the financial year in Australia, and if you have some coins at the back of the couch cushions, you could do no better than expanding your OHS knowledge by purchasing a discount annual subscription to the SafetyAtWorkBlog.

I am offering a 50% discount on annual subscriptions to the SafetyAtWorkBlog for a short time. We are currently running at a record readership rate, producing 2-4 articles a week and often on events not available elsewhere.

If you like what you read from me on LinkedIn or other social media, please help the site continue to operate and stay independent.

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Eliminating Concussion and CTE From Australian Rules Football

Every time a sporting body is confronted with concussion data, someone inevitably asks whether the game can be played without the risk. In most industries, that question is the starting point for a “so far as is reasonably practicable” (SFAIRP) analysis. In sport, it’s treated as heresy. But if we apply the same occupational health and safety (OHS) logic to Australian rules football that we apply to construction, mining or manufacturing, the answer is, if you want to eliminate concussion and the risks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), you have to eliminate the mechanisms that cause it. And once you do that, you no longer have the game as we know it.

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AFL, CTE and SFAIRP: When “the rough and tumble” becomes a foreseeable harm

The death of 23‑year‑old footballer Nick Lowden should force the Australian Football League (AFL) and every sporting body that claims to care about player welfare to confront the fact that the risks of brain injury in Australian football are no longer mysterious, emerging, or debatable. They are foreseeable, documented, and cumulative. And once a risk is foreseeable, the occupational health and safety (OHS) duty to eliminate or minimise it so far as is reasonably practicable (SFAIRP) applies.

A Four Corners investigation to be broadcast on June 29, 2026, examines Lowden’s death. (This article is based on some preliminary reporting on the issue by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

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The HR and OHS divide persists

One of my ongoing frustrations — and this blog is a good example — is that occupational health and safety (OHS) is rarely read or heard outside its own bubble. Yet OHS cannot fix OHS problems on its own. We depend on HR, engineers, accountants, risk managers, IT specialists and others, but we almost never get these disciplines in the same room, hearing the same information, facing the same hazards, and designing solutions together.

A recent HR interview with Dr Kat Page offers a useful example.

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What OHS can learn from Charles Dickens

Author Charles Dickens is often cited for his description of and opposition to the working conditions in his time – child labour, executive (im)morality, excessive workload, and poor working conditions. However, the image that has always stayed with me is the Circumlocution Office described in Little Dorrit.

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Another corporate scandal — and why this matters for OHS

Another major company, KPMG, has been caught out in unethical behaviour, lies and mismanagement, only a few years after PwC’s scandal and not long after the damning Banking and Finance Royal Commission. These are the very institutions we are told to treat as exemplars of leadership and governance. Their repeated failures should force employers to question the advice they receive from these firms, including on occupational health and safety (OHS), psychosocial risk and organisational culture.

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Beyond Training – Designing Work to Prevent Harm

If the first lesson from IAWBH2026 was that psychological risks must be treated as system hazards, the second is that most organisations remain structurally ill-equipped to manage them. Despite years of policy development and training initiatives, the evidence presented at the recent International Association on Workplace Bullying and Harassment conference in Canberra showed persistent gaps between intention and outcome.

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