Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers and economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz are old friends. One of their conversations was turned into the lead article in the February edition of The Monthly (paywalled). Several of their thoughts impinge on how occupational health and safety (OHS) laws are applied and may be reformed.
The most popular solution to physical and psychological occupational health and safety (OHS) problems is leadership. Leadership is crucial to implementing changes to work processes and policies that can prevent harm, yet we often view leadership as executive benevolence, without really examining executive leadership in modern workplaces.
Looking at current leadership traits through a different lens may help us understand why it continues to be so difficult to improve worker health and safety.
In Australia, the sovereign citizen movement has gained strength for some time, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also, according to The Age newspaper recently, creating administrative problems for the courts – Flash juries and Bible verses: How sovereign citizens clog up Australian courts (paywalled). I began considering how I would manage a worker who held sovereign-citizen beliefs and might object to certain policies and directives used in the occupational health and safety (OHS) context.
I have written several articles on the moral foundations of occupational health and safety (OHS). This week, I sought assistance from the Bible via artificial intelligence apps, Text with Jesus and others. Below is that conversation and some useful, but synthetic, Biblical advice on managing a business safely.
Every few years, a new global initiative arrives promising to reshape corporate behaviour. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were meant to align business with human well-being. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) promised transparency. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting was sold as the market‑friendly mechanism that would finally make corporations care about people and the planet.
Yet here we are, decades into these frameworks, and the pattern of harm inside workplaces looks remarkably familiar. Catastrophic failures still occur in companies with immaculate sustainability reports. Precarious work continues to expand. Psychosocial harm is rising, not falling. And the gap between what corporations say and what they do has never been wider.
The uncomfortable truth is that these global initiatives are not designed to prevent harm. They are designed to signal responsibility without redistributing power. And harm prevention, as we know from decades of occupational health and safety (OHS) experience, is fundamentally a question of power.
An open letter about workplace suicides was published to support World Mental Health Day in 2024. The research work of some of the signatories has continued and appeared in a 2026 editorial in Volume 46 of “Crisis – The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention“, calling for action.
[This article, unavoidably, discusses suicide]
Over the past few months, I have increasingly encountered the term “regulated industries” in the context of occupational health and safety (OHS) laws. In OHS in Australia, these industries seem predominantly to include:
I can identify no reason why farming should not also be a “regulated industry”.
