ethics – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Redesigning Risk — Quinlan and Mazzucato Unite to Make Work Safer

Whenever Mariana Mazzucato publishes a new book, she appears in the press everywhere as part of book tours and promotions. Her latest book, The Common Good Economy, is likely to be as influential on government and international policymakers as her other books have been. Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, pays close attention to her perspectives. These perspectives relate to the management of occupational health and safety (OHS) because they present a different or tweaked sense of corporate morality, under which workers should be safe and healthy.

This article is not a review of the Common Good Economy book, although it is very good. Instead, I compare Mazzucato’s approach on work to Professor Michael Quinlan‘s take on precarity.

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Another corporate scandal — and why this matters for OHS

Another major company, KPMG, has been caught out in unethical behaviour, lies and mismanagement, only a few years after PwC’s scandal and not long after the damning Banking and Finance Royal Commission. These are the very institutions we are told to treat as exemplars of leadership and governance. Their repeated failures should force employers to question the advice they receive from these firms, including on occupational health and safety (OHS), psychosocial risk and organisational culture.

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The Real Reasons Workload Harm Persists in Modern Workplaces

This year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has released excellent information on psychosocial hazards at work to support the World Day for Safety and Health at Work. (Australian researchers seem to have been instrumental in the report) I read the report, looking for more upstream concerns, such as political and socioeconomic factors that lead employers to create or allow work overload, the most significant contributor to work-related stress. This is what I found.

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When Everyone’s a Leader and No One’s Accountable

Business management advisers keep calling everyone a “leader”, but the term has become so vague it obscures who actually holds the power — and therefore the accountability — to prevent work-related harm. Psychosocial hazards aren’t fixed by slogans or culture talk; they’re shaped by decisions about workload, staffing, supervision and resources.

This article is based on my presentation to the Central Safety Group members on May 12, 2026, about leadership and occupational health and safety (OHS).

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The Legacy of Denial That Still Haunts Psychosocial Hazard Management

In the mid‑1970s, I arrived at Dandenong High School still clinging to the small importance I’d felt as a primary‑school Prefect. That confidence evaporated the day a student yelled “bums to the wall” as Science Teacher and Year 7 Coordinator Tim Richardson walked past. I didn’t yet know what a paedophile was, but Richardson would not be prosecuted for sexual offences until 2018, dying in jail a year later.

This experience reflects a broader cultural pattern of denial that still shapes how organisations respond to psychosocial hazards today. Australian companies, executives and employers are grappling with “new” duties to prevent psychological harm, yet Richardson’s story shows just how long our institutions have excused what should never have been excused.

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“Words and gestures … can only be genuine when they are backed by doing”

As I write this, hundreds of workers’ memorial services are taking place around the world. I usually attend the Melbourne, Victoria, event and wish I could have been there today because one speaker, Lana Cormie, transcended the usual politics and platitudes to outline a broader strategy for occupational health and safety (OHS) reform.

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A Workplace Death. An Upheld Conviction. And a Standard Every C-Suite Officer Should Understand.

A post written by Wade Needham (April 15, 2026), and reproduced with permission.

Two judgments totaling 75,000 words were handed down across 2024 and 2026. Not everyone will read them. Everyone should understand what they establish.

Years ago, during commissioning work at Port Hedland for the Roy Hill project, someone asked me how I knew the night shift crew were following the isolation procedure for livening the sub stations. I could name the critical risk. I could point to the training records, the procedure, the sign-off sheet, the safety advisor on shift. And when they asked how I knew it was being followed at 2am when nobody was watching, I paused. Long pause. Then I said something like “Well, the reports don’t show any issues.”

I have never forgotten that pause. Because I knew, in that moment, that I was describing paperwork. Not reality.

That is the most dangerous sentence in safety governance. The reports don’t show any issues. It is the sentence that sat underneath everything that went wrong at the Port of Auckland. I wanted to distil down elements of the judgement I found insightful.

But first, a too-long, don’t-want-to-read summary for those short on time.

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