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Unsafe Work, Confused Enforcement and a Union That Could Be Bought

I didn’t expect Michael Crosby to talk about occupational health and safety (OHS) in his presentation at this week’s National Press Club, but OHS permeated almost everything he discussed. Most of the audience was there for the industrial relations (IR) perspective and background to the Royal Commission into the Integrity of Major Public and Civil Infrastructure Construction Projects in Victoria, which focuses on the Construction, Forestry, Maritime and Energy Union (CFMEU) and its relationship with the Victorian government and the industry more generally.

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Australian Workplaces Cannot Adapt Forever

On November 5 2026, Safe Work Australia (SWA) held a research webinar on the occupational health and safety (OHS) context of global warming/heating. This continued this year’s OHS theme, promoted by the International Labour Organisation. SWA will develop a strategy on the issue and can already draw on ILO research and frameworks, but OHS has very little political clout. Global warming has only slightly more. Addressing this existential risk will require significant, rapid change in social structures, purposes, and political policy. OHS has an important role to play, but the scale of climate change means that workplace safety interventions alone will never be enough.

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Psychosocial Safety Is Becoming a Governance Test, Not a Wellbeing Program

Three recent legal commentaries reveal something important about the evolution of workplace health and safety. They address different issues, from board governance to sexual harassment investigations and cumulative psychosocial hazards, but they all point to the same conclusion: employers are running out of opportunities to treat psychological health as an individual problem. We may be at the start of a work revolution.

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Safe Work Australia’s Big Bet on an Expanded OHS System

The release of Safe Work Australia’s Best Practice review left me wondering whether Australian work health and safety policy has reached regulatory overreach, or whether it is finally catching up with the realities of contemporary work.

Much of the discussion has focused on the report’s individual recommendations. What interests me more is an assumption that seems to underlie almost every recommendation: that occupational health and safety (OHS) should become the nation’s principal framework for preventing workplace harm in all its forms, not merely physical and psychological injury.

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Safe Work Australia’s Review and the Predictable Politics of OHS Change

The “Best Practice Review of the Model Work Health and Safety Laws” report released by Safe Work Australia (SWA) is a lot to digest. Summaries and initial analyses are already appearing on some LinkedIn and law firm posts, but the report needs careful consideration. The recommendations seem sound, but such things almost always trigger a knee-jerk reaction from business groups, driven by ideological objections and concerns about increased business costs. I suspect we will see some of this objection in the media over the next few days.

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The Work-From-Home Right Meets Business Group Anxiety

Based on mainstream media reports of the working-from-home (WFH) debate in Victoria over the last few weeks, Victorian politics has fractured over the proposal to give most employees a right to work from home two days a week. The politics of the WFH initiative came to the fore, even if occupational health and safety (OHS) didn’t.

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Psychosocial Safety Gets Serious When the Wellbeing Fluff Is Stripped Away

Day Two of PHSCon was likely to be uncomfortable. Day One covered context, community and curiosity. Day Two asked a more difficult question. Now that employers know more about psychosocial hazards, are they prepared to change how work is designed, managed and measured? The broad answer from the speakers and case studies was “not really”. Genuinely managing psychosocial hazards and psychological safety is not a wellbeing campaign, a mindfulness app, a webinar series or another glossy page on the intranet. It is occupational health and safety (OHS), and it requires the same attention to hazards, controls, governance, and review that employers claim to routinely apply to physical risks.

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