Walk through any corporate sustainability report and you’ll find the same familiar choreography: a glossy declaration of “unwavering commitment to safety,” a handful of photos featuring smiling workers in immaculate PPE, and a CEO foreword that reads like it was written by a risk‑averse committee. What you won’t find is any serious engagement with the …
Neil Foster and Jacqueline Meredith‘s 3rd Edition of Workplace Health and Safety Law in Australia can be seen as a companion to Creighton and Stewart’s Labour Law. Both have excellent occupational health and safety (OHS) content for their respective markets; both have very different tones....
Victoria is developing its own Code of Practice for managing (and hopefully preventing) psychosocial hazards in the workplace, ahead of amendments to its occupational health and safety (OHS) laws in late 2025. But how powerful and enforceable can a Code of Practice be? A new book by Arie Freiberg, “Regulation in Australia“, helps explain this, …
Most submissions to the inquiry into Sentencing Occupational Health and Safety Offences in Victoria are now publicly available. They raise a lot of different issues and some grumbles even though the Sentencing Advisory Council provided some structure to the topics it wanted addressed. A major purpose of any penalty is to deter harmful and damaging actions from being repeated. …
This article was originally published in the SafetyAtWork magazine in March 2002, has been slightly edited with new links included. It is surprising how slow progress in the auditing sector has been, supporting some of the points raised in the Brydon Review. The Enron saga means many things to many people. Some see the collapse … Continue reading “Auditors and Exorcists”
The Australian Government has released the final report of the Independent Review of its Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws, conducted by Marie Boland. Importantly, the Government has not issued its response yet and, given that there is a Federal Election in a couple of months’ time, is unlikely to. Why have another issue complicate …
The public comment phase of the Victorian Government’s Independent OHS Review into WorkSafe Victoria has concluded and most of the submissions are appearing on the review’s website. Some submissions are extensive, others are simply a whinge. One topic did not get much of a mention in the 40 submissions currently available – on-the-spot fines. The …
