A recent occupational health and safety (OHS) prosecution appeared to involve elements of both worker and employer complacency. Earlier this year, the Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) circulated a media release titled “Returning to Work: Peak Safety Body Warns Complacency Costs Lives.” The issue of complacency deserves some examination....
A recent occupational health and safety (OHS) prosecution over a quad bike fatality gained some mainstream media attention, primarily due to one of the owners being an independent New South Wales politician, Helen Dalton. Strip out the political newsworthiness, and there are some serious OHS lessons for all employers to be learned from the Court …
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 …
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 …
This week saw the release of an inquiry into the workplace culture of the New South Wales police force. The findings were damning, but even though all Australian jurisdictions have police forces, the report received little attention beyond NSW, perhaps because we have heard it before. Coincidentally, this report was published one week after Carlo …
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.
Occupational health and safety (OHS) in Australia frothed up big time about Hollnagel‘s Safety II approach and the Safety Differently movement. But as with most things OHS, the general approach was self-confined to the immediate systems of work, rather than considering the system of work as integral to the system of business or society generally. …
