The public submission process for Australia’s Independent Review of Work Health and Safety Laws closes today. So finish up your draft and tell the Government what is working and what is not. BUT if you cannot finish the draft, do what I did, and contribute directly to the Review using its online (Engage) portal which will remain open until the end of May 2018.
Safe Work Australia has told SafetyAtWorkBlog that the Review continues to seek:
Effective consultation is a core element of building a functional safety management system in any workplace. This involves talking and listening. Various occupational health and safety (OHS) regulators have pushed this point in the past usually with static images of mouths and ears but WorkSafe New Zealand has released a series of videos in support of its existing”How you can use your mouth” campaign. Thankfully WorkSafeNZ has taken a leaf from the Air New Zealand book and used humour.
Of particular interest is the brief but importance emphasis on the role of the ethical bystander.
Australia’s Fair Work Commission (FWC) has released the latest (March 2018) edition of its Anti-Bullying Benchbook. This is a regularly published document that offers background to its decisions and definitions used by the FWC through case studies and plain-English explanations. The Benchbook clearly states that any occupational health and safety (OHS) issues are to be directed to the relevant OHS regulator but the book provides useful insight to a more (and limited) industrial relations approach to workplace bullying.
A major attraction of the
This is an edited version of my presentation to delegates at the inaugural NSW Regional Safety Conference & Expo in Newcastle, Australia on March 17, 2018.
The current approach to occupational health and safety (OHS) is that we shouldn’t separate it from business operations. One of the motivations for achieving success in business is to build a strong organisational culture that integrates safety.
Companies often start this task by developing Mission Statements or Pledges. Quite often these are done by talking to a lot of different people in the organisation. And I don’t know of any mission statement that hasn’t been already run through Legal and Marketing – they don’t always get run through Safety. What happens is that these statements can become more florid and more inexact, and more unclear. Some of them descend into Business Bullshit.
Product Safety has never been far from the quad bike safety debate in Australia.
It was Product Safety that removed the three-wheel ATV from sale in the 1970s and 80s and it seems Product Safety may achieve a safety resolution that occupational health and safety (OHS) consultation could not.
On March 22, 2018 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) issued a media statement that says the ACCC, amongst other actions:
“…is proposing a mandatory safety standard that:….requires manufacturers to integrate an operator protection device, such as a crush protection device or roll over protection device in the design of new quad bikes…..”
I really enjoyed presenting at the Central Safety Group’s monthly meeting yesterday*. (Taught me not to use slide presentations if you can avoid it.). Here is a brief summary of my take on the new international Standard for OHS Management Systems – ISO45001 – that I shared with the group members. Continue reading “Quick and dirty summary of new OHS management Standard”
The publication date for the first truly international Standard on occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems, ISO45001, the rhetoric is heating up in Australia.