Senator Jacquie Lambie has been a staunch advocate for improving the occupational health and safety (OHS) of Australia’s defence force personnel. In 2022, she gave a confronting presentation to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, and she continued her advocacy on day 1 of the 48th session of the Australian parliament by asking reasonable questions that could also be posed in non-military industries.
Militant construction unions in Australia have damaged the relationship between the community and the trade union movement. Although the typical trade union member may be a nurse, a teacher, or a public servant, most would depict a member as a big, aggressive, rude, and domineering man. Australia’s trade union movement is trying to redress this perception, but it cannot progress until it eliminates the unsafe behaviour of the organisers of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). The Queensland government is set to give reform a red-hot go.
In November 2022, then-Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins explained why sexual harassment in Australian workplaces continues to happen. Basically, she said this was because the sex discrimination laws were reactive to a worker complaint and placed no duty on employers to prevent these types of incidents. But there is more to it than that, and the recent imposition of a positive duty under sex discrimination laws is still not preventing work-related harm.
Recently, the Weekly Times reported* some disturbing statistics about farm-related deaths in Victoria. It summarised the AgHealth Australia data as:
“Farm deaths have doubled in the past 12 months, with vehicles the leading contributing factor, as farmers and authorities label the issue an emergency.
Seventy-two people died and there were 133 serious injuries in 2024, new AgHealth Australia data shows, up from 32 deaths in 2023 and 55 in 2022.
In Victoria, there were 16 deaths in 2024, up from seven in 2023.”
Recently former WorkSafe Victoria executive, Dr Narelle Beer, penned an article in LinkedIn called “Going to work should not kill you!” The article is a good introduction to occupational health and safety (OHS) but some important points are overlooked or unexplored.
There is a curious set of self-published safety-related books by Lance Luke. They seem to feature on Amazon, so I purchased one to satisfy my curiosity. “Top Ten OSHA Violations” is a thin, low-cost book that is little more than one may see in an occupational health and safety (OHS) convention – snappy, click-bait title, minimal explanation and several case studies. This is not a book regarding any evidence beyond the extensive lived experience of the author. So what are the top 10?
Continue reading “A cheap introduction to regulatory risks”The latest edition of OHS Professional magazine carried a long article by Kerry Smith titled “Understanding and Combating Complacency in the Workplace.” The article uses examples at the worker level when the greatest risk posed by complacency is likely to be with managers, executives, their attitudes to safety, and their own safety management systems.
