Category: environment

The Potential of Safety Impact Assessments

For decades, countries around the world have required that major projects undergo an assessment before they can proceed. Australia has gone further, with the once‑in‑a‑generation reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 passing Parliament in November 2025 and rolling out through 2026. These reforms introduced legally binding National Environmental Standards and a new National Environmental Protection Agency. So here’s the question we keep dodging: why don’t we also have Safety Impact Assessments (SIA)?

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Maximum Workplace Temperatures: A Political Fix Searching for an OHS Problem

The United Kingdom and Europe are again struggling through dangerous summer heat. In Australia, it’s tempting to feel a little smug. We’ve spent decades adapting our houses, cities and work practices to heat: wide‑brimmed hats in schools, backyard pools, ventilation, shade, job rotation, and a long list of practical controls that employers and regulators understand well. None of this makes heat safe, but it does make working in excessive heat manageable.

Into this UK heatwave steps Greens MP Hannah Spencer, proposing a Private Member’s Bill to establish a maximum workplace temperature.

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Stop Blaming Workers for Problems They Didn’t Create

Australian occupational health and safety (OHS) is moving from a focus on interventions at the individual worker level to examination of the operational and managerial systems that may cause or encourage harm and incidents, especially in relation to psychological safety at work.

Although a new book from the United States does not address OHS specifically, its long title indicates its relevance – “It’s On You – How the Rich and Powerful Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems”.

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Travelling Through Australia’s Beautiful and Broken Mining Country

Lindsay Fitzclarence‘s travelogue “The Dirty Life of Mining in Australia” is a thought-provoking work that combines social, economic, industrial, indigenous, and environmental perspectives into a journey across Australia. Occupational health and safety (OHS) is one theme, but it is part of many, and the book is better for it.

Continue reading “Travelling Through Australia’s Beautiful and Broken Mining Country”

Is the era of resilient people over?

In occupational health and safety (OHS) one hears about resilience usually in terms of psychological health and the ability to cope with stress. Applying a primary focus on resilience to prevent and manage mental health at work has been discredited, but resilience has a broader application and one that echoes the OHS-based concerns.

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Beyond COVID Toward Safer Smarter Workplaces

The recent COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the virus and risk continue. Like any biological hazard that occurs in or affects workplaces, occupational health and safety (OHS) personnel need to be ready to respond appropriately should the hazard emerge or expand.

It is generally accepted that Safe Work Australia responded as quickly as possible when developing COVID-19 guidance, given that everyone was trying to work out what the hell was happening. Shortly before the pandemic, WorkSafe Victoria had published the first edition of a guide on how employers could respond to pandemics.

But where is Australia at now? How prepared are we for the next disease pandemic or epidemic? I asked Safe Work Australia and WorkSafe Victoria for an update.

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Heat, Harm and the Cost of Denial

As Victoria shivers in the middle of its Winter and a cop-killer runs loose in the mountains in the middle of the state, it may seem odd to think about the occupational health and safety (OHS) context of working in excessive heat. However, give us a couple of months, and it will be a hot topic again in the Southern Hemisphere. (First and last weather pun, I promise)

A recent article in The New York Times (paywalled) examined excessive heat in Spain, providing useful details on the changes being implemented—some old, some new.

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