Recently, Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, released his 2026 Budget. Other than better availability of Australian Standards, there was little in it that directly affects workplace health and safety. But perhaps we need to look at this in a broader socioeconomic and political context.
I have revisited many of the Jim Chalmers-themed articles from the last few years and tried to provide that broader perspective.
When the Australian Labor Party won the 2022 election from the conservative coalition parties, Chalmers seemed hungry for radical socioeconomic change. Various political and economic factors, such as inflation, led him to pull his head in slightly. Perhaps the most prominent green shoot is that Chalmers and others in the Anthony Albanese government are prepared to change long-held but increasingly difficult-to-justify structures, systems, and practices. Tax concessions on housing investment are the obvious ones. Certainly, there are broken promises, but there were strong hints last year at Chalmer’s Economic Roundtable that changes were likely, as he said that “everything was on the table”.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has spent several years trying to shift Australian economic thinking beyond the old habit of treating Gross Domestic Product as the only measure that matters. Through his interest in a well-being framework, his engagement with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, and his repeated call for better, rather than simply more, regulation, Chalmers has been signalling a broader reform agenda. That agenda speaks directly to productivity, inequity, inequality, and workplace reform, even when occupational health and safety (OHS) is not explicitly named. For those of us interested in work and harm prevention, that omission matters. If Australian politiciians are serious about economic reform, they should not continue to treat worker health, psychological safety, and job quality as peripheral issues. They are central to how productivity is created, how inequality is experienced, and how reform either succeeds or fails.
Better regulation, not blind deregulation
Chalmers is not arguing for a crude increase in regulation, nor is he embracing the conservative reflex that equates all regulation with red tape. Instead, he appears to support regulation that is smarter, more coherent and better aligned with social and economic goals. That position overlaps with Stiglitz’s long-standing critique of neoliberalism. Both men seem to accept that regulation should curb harmful externalities, support innovation that serves society, and prevent the market from rewarding behaviour that shifts costs onto workers, communities and future generations. This is a very different position from the familiar business complaint that productivity is being strangled by compliance. It suggests that the real issue is not whether regulation exists, but whether it is designed intelligently and whether it protects the right things.
That matters for workplace reform because OHS has long been misrepresented as a compliance burden instead of a productive discipline. If poor regulation creates duplication, uncertainty and procedural clutter, then reform should remove those weaknesses. But if regulation protects workers from injury, fatigue, psychosocial harm, exploitation and unsafe job design, then removing it would not be reform at all. It would simply shift business costs onto workers, families, compensation systems and the public purse. Chalmers’ stated preference for better regulation creates a useful opening: OHS could be reframed not as red tape but as part of the institutional architecture that enables decent, sustainable work.
Productivity is about the quality of work, not just the speed of output
Australia’s productivity debate has been dominated by the same institutions, assumptions and metrics for too long. Too often, productivity is treated as a matter of cutting regulation, restraining labour costs or speeding up approvals. Yet these blog articles point to a more grounded reality: safer, more stable, and better-designed work that creates more productive assets. Poor safety, toxic leadership, high churn, burnout, absenteeism, presenteeism and repeated compensation claims are not unfortunate side issues. They are evidence of economic failure inside the workplace. They erode capability, corporate knowledge, continuity and trust. If these losses are not measured properly, businesses and governments can keep pretending that productivity is improving while they are actually exploiting the workforce on which productive performance depends.
Several examples in the SafetyAtWorkBlog support this. Good OHS management can
- lower staff turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism;
- improve retention of corporate knowledge;
- strengthen consultation between workers and management;
- improve service and product quality; and
- free managers to focus on strategy rather than constantly putting out fires.
None of those outcomes is marginal. They go to the heart of business performance. Yet they are rarely included in mainstream productivity conversations, including high-level economic roundtables. This absence is one reason OHS remains politically weak. It is usually counted only when it fails, and even then, mainly through workers’ compensation data that capture only part of the total harm. A reform agenda that takes productivity seriously should start by admitting that unsafe and unhealthy work is itself a drag on productivity.
Inequity and inequality are workplace issues as much as economic ones
The articles situate Chalmers’ agenda within a broader argument about inequity and inequality. Stiglitz’s warning that economies are not doing well simply because GDP rises is especially relevant here. If gains are concentrated at the top while wages stagnate, work intensifies, labour protections weaken, and more risk is pushed onto workers, then the economy may be growing in statistical terms while becoming harsher in lived terms. Professor Paul Read’s comments on well-being, flourishing and the erosion of the social contract reinforce the same point. The concern is not just poverty in a narrow sense. It is the distribution of opportunity, security, exposure to harm and capacity to influence the conditions of work.
Workplaces are where many of these inequities become concrete. Casualisation, labour hire, gig work, insecure hours, poor consultation, weak bargaining power and the sidelining of psychosocial hazards all shape who bears risk and who enjoys reward. Intergenerational inequities also appear here, not only in housing and wealth but in the quality of work available to younger people and the sustainability of their working lives. If Chalmers wants a reform agenda that takes inequality seriously, then workplace reform cannot be confined to wages or industrial tribunals. It has to include job design, workload, safety systems, consultation rights, and the actual distribution of risks within organisations. OHS is relevant because it provides a practical expression of the idea that no business model should depend on preventable harm.
Well-being rhetoric will mean little without workplace reform
One tension running through the blog articles on Chalmers is the gap between reform language and institutional follow-through. Chalmers’ interest in a well-being budget, or in the softer successor framework of measuring what matters, has symbolic value. It broadens the dashboard. It creates permission to talk about outcomes that GDP obscures. But I doubted whether this would survive institutional resistance, weak resourcing and political caution. Well-being frameworks can easily become descriptive rather than transformative. They can produce elegant indicators while leaving the underlying organisation of work untouched. If that happens, the concept of well-being risks becoming another layer of rhetoric laid over systems that still reward overwork, fragmentation, insecurity and silence.
The workplace examples in the articles point out that corporate well-being programs have often been delegated to Human Resources and aimed at the individual, offering support after stress has already been built into the work. OHS, especially through the newer focus on psychosocial hazards, points in a different direction. It asks employers to identify and control structural causes of harm: workload, bullying, poor supervision, low role clarity, weak support, traumatic exposure, poor change management and other hazards embedded in systems of work. That is far closer to meaningful workplace reform than a set of wellness offerings. If well-being is to matter economically, it has to translate into enforceable, practical changes in how work is organised.
What workplace reform could look like
Based on the Chalmers articles, a Chalmers-aligned workplace reform agenda would not begin with tearing up OHS laws. It would begin with modernising and integrating them. That means recognising contemporary work arrangements such as hybrid, remote, mobile, labour-hire and gig work. It means updating Consultation so it is not trapped in communication assumptions from the 1970s. It means reducing safety clutter and administrative duplication while preserving genuine prevention. It means embedding OHS more directly in procurement, especially where governments contract high-risk work or major infrastructure. It means treating churn, skills erosion, psychosocial harm and productivity loss as measurable business consequences rather than unfortunate side effects. It also means using Treasury’s influence to support safe work through funding, settings, incentives, and expectations, rather than leaving OHS entirely to specialist regulators.
The blog articles suggest the need for a bigger conceptual and design change. They challenge the tendency to discuss workers as though they were infinitely adaptable inputs, while every other form of capital is costed, maintained, and protected. It questions why governments and businesses can talk about resilience, continuity and infrastructure in relation to supply chains, energy systems and executive capability, but not in relation to the human beings who make organisations function. That challenge is uncomfortable, but necessary. A serious reform program would recognise that unsafe work damages productive capacity in the same way as other neglected infrastructure. It would also recognise that procurement rules, auditing systems and economic incentives currently allow too much room for organisations to externalise these costs.
The real test for Chalmers’ reform politics
The real test of Jim Chalmers’ approach is whether his reform politics can move beyond language that is humane and intellectually attractive into institutions that redistribute risk more fairly and measure success more honestly. It seems that he is at least asking better questions than many of his opponents. He seems more open to regulations that protect people while still enabling innovation and investment. He appears more willing to talk about wellbeing, inequality and the social purposes of the economy. But unless those ideas reach the workplace, they will remain incomplete. Productivity will continue to be discussed as though it exists apart from the quality and safety of work. Inequality will continue to be analysed as though it is created only through tax settings. And workplace reform will continue to be reduced to debates about red tape, flexibility and compliance cost.
Just before posting this article, the Australian media reported a serious outbreak of diphtheria in some jurisdictions. One of the causes of the rapid spread of the disease was identified as crowded houses in the Northern Territory, especially in indigenous communities. So housing becomes an important factor in public health and disease control, but it always was. However, this connection was unlikely to be calculated as a benefit for more and better housing in these communities. Good infrastructure planning is directly connected to disease prevention and control, just as adequate resources and a positive workplace culture benefit workers’ physical and psychological health, yet this is rarely accounted for.
A better reading of the material in the Chalmers articles is that safe, healthy and dignified work should be treated as economic infrastructure. That would align productivity with prevention, link inequality to the distribution of workplace risk, and make workplace reform part of national reform rather than a specialist side issue. If Chalmers truly wants to measure what matters, then the health of workers, the sustainability of jobs, and the harm built into business models have to be counted. Until then, Australia’s economic debate will remain narrower than its real problems, and its reform ambitions will remain smaller than they need to be.
Note: I used AI to create a framework for this article based on my selection of articles from SafetyAtWorkBlog.