Occupational health and safety (OHS) people talk a lot, but often they preach to the choir when they need to reach a new audience. Last night, philosophy academic Dr Peter Brace provided a lecture on psychosocial hazards and psychological safety to over 50 members of a diverse audience in an upstairs room of a Richmond pub. This is what he said and what I learned.
“Common Sense” is a concept all occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals must address, but that doesn’t mean it’s static. My six months on Norfolk Island provided me with a new perspective.
In several blog articles on “common sense”, I found the concept a deeply unreliable foundation for OHS because it is subjective, dismissive, and routinely used to defend and mask harmful organisational habits. As one article notes,
“Common Sense often seems to be the way I think or the way I do something – ‘It’s just common sense’”,
Every book by Ellen Pinkos Cobb deserves close attention, as her perspective and approach to examining sexual harassment and psychosocial hazards in the workplace are unique and valuable. Her new book, “The Global Evolution of Bullying, Harassment, and Discrimination Laws” is a great addition to one’s library.
Workplace bullying and harassment are often described as interpersonal problems, such as a clash of personalities, a difficult manager, or a “bad apple” who spoils the barrel. This framing is convenient, familiar, and wrong. Bullying is not an individual defect. It is a systemic outcome produced by organisational structures, cultural norms, and socioeconomic pressures that make harmful conduct predictable. If employers continue to treat bullying as a behavioural characteristic rather than a structural hazard, they will keep missing the causes and potential controls, and fail to meet their legislative duty of care.
Political debates do not stop at the workplace door. When questions of independence, self-government and national identity become highly charged, they can affect employee wellbeing, workplace relationships and an organisation’s ability to operate calmly and fairly. The current discussion around Alberta separatism in Canada, when compared with Norfolk Island’s campaign for greater self-government, offers useful lessons for Australian employers. The constitutional issues differ, but both cases show how distrust of distant decision-makers can deepen division, and why workplaces need practical systems for consultation, respectful communication, and psychosocial risk management.
A LinkedIn colleague said this to me recently in a thread I started:
“I can’t see the logic in not integrating psychosocial hazards into the risk assessment process. The scope and complexity of the org will obvs have an impact but on one hand you’re saying employers have to manage both physical and psychosocial hazards/controls, but not to use the same process. And while we’re at it, that’s HR’s responsibility so it’s not on us. I say engage, embrace and guide the entire leadership team (HR included) in the process. As to why you wouldn’t use the risk assessment process I’m keen to know how you demonstrate you’ve used the hierarchy of control and reduced the risk alarp.” (slight edits)
Here is my response and clarification.
Returning to Australia after six months as a health and safety adviser on Norfolk Island has left me thinking hard about what “doing safety” really means in a remote, resource‑tight community. Norfolk Island Regional Council has cycled through several mainland advisers over the years, usually on short contracts and sometimes without an effective handover. That churn created complexity, not culpability. As I wrote in my notes at the time: “There were many safety things the Council could have done differently… but I don’t think it was doing anything wrong.”
The real issue seemed to be differing expectations – what mainland advisers thought was achievable, and what the island’s workforce actually needed.
