Western Australia’s Parliament heard more about the State’s investigation into work-related mental health on June 26 2018.
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Category: evidence
Western Australia opens consultation on WHS laws
On June 28 2018 in the West Australian Parliament, the Minister for Commerce and Industrial Relations, Bill Johnston, progressed the State’s move to towards harmonised Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws. According to Hansard, Johnston said
“Last July, I formed a ministerial advisory panel to advise on the development of a single, harmonised and comprehensive work health and safety act. The new act will cover all workplaces in Western Australia and be aligned with legislation in other Australian jurisdictions…..” (page 4146, emphasis added)
That WA will have new safety laws to cover all workplaces is a very good move;
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Dreamworld – this week and beyond
Managerial representatives of Dreamworld appeared at the second week of the inquest into the deaths of four patrons at the Australian theme park in 2016. The week ended with Dreamworld’s parent company Ardent Leisure advising the Australian Securities Exchange of the departure of the current Chief Executive Officer, Craig Davidson. So what does this all mean?
Safety Management
Early last week, Dreamworld’s former safety manager, Mark
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Three books that challenge OHS
Book publisher Routledge has recently released books about occupational health and safety (OHS) that are very critical of OHS’ role, or that of the health and safety professional, in modern business. Below I dip into the
- The Fearless World of Professional Safety in the 21st Century
- The 10 Step MBA for Safety and Health Practitioners, and
- Naked Safety – Exploring The Dynamics of Safety in a Fast-Changing World.
Read widely, carefully and analytically.
One of the most rewarding sources of occupational health and safety (OHS) information is the literature review undertaken by, usually, university researchers. It is rewarding because someone else has done most of the reading for you and the spread of resources can be massive and/or global. But, there can also be missed opportunities from taking a narrow scope and from excluding some non-peer-reviewed analysis. One of these involves a systematic review of lost-time injuries in the global mining industry.
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Don’t “say anything to anyone..” – Dreamworld inquest
The first week of the two-week inquest into four fatalities at the Dreamworld theme park in Queensland has concluded. It has substantial occupational health and safety (OHS) management lessons for Australian businesses in a similar way to that of many recent workplace disasters. Those lessons are basic and the hazards are well-known in the OHS profession. Journalists Jamie Walker and Mark Schliebs, in the Weekend Australian newspaper, provided an excellent review (paywalled) of the lessons from that first week.
SafetyAtWorkBlog has not written about the deaths on the, now discontinued, Thunder Rapids ride because there has been an
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New inquiry into sexual harassment – an OHS opportunity and challenge
On June 20 2018, the Australian government announced a National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, claiming it to be a world-first. Sexual harassment is not an occupational health and safety (OHS) hazard in many ways BUT the psychological harm it can create is. The job of an OHS person is to encourage employers to reduce work-related harm through prevention, so we need to prevent sexual harassment, just as we do for all the work activities that contribute to poor psychological health and safety.
The macroeconomic costs of sexual harassment in the workplace may be of interest to politicians and business lobbyists but this can be a significant distraction from identifying ways to prevent psychological harm, which should be the most important legacy of this type of inquiry.
Addressing the OHS impacts of
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