In January 2025, Kilvington Grammar was fined over $100,000 for breaches of occupational health and safety (OHS) laws related to the death of one of its students, 16-year-old diabetic Lachlan Cook, who was on an overseas school trip. The best source of publicly available reports on this case appears to be the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This article does not discuss the incident but focuses on the sentencing decisions and their relevance to OHS.
The latest edition of the European Trade Union Institute’s HesaMag features articles on Artificial Intelligence, but the go-to article for me was the magazine’s perspective on Australia’s ban on engineered stone.
We often learn more about ourselves by reading how others see us, so I was keen to read the perspective of sociologist Catherine Cavalin and historian Alfredo Menendez Navarro.
There is a considerable overlap between organisational psychology, Human Resources and occupational health and safety (OHS), even though each has developed its own culture and language. People are just starting to acknowledge the overlap and trying to increase it.
One example of that overlap was on display in an interview with prominent podcaster Mel Robbins, who admitted that:
“The hardest thing about what I do is that oftentimes the advice and the tools sound dumb or repetitive…”
Self-help books often include a nugget of useful information related to occupational health and safety. Paul Taylor‘s “Death by Confort – How Modern Life is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It” offers a recent example.
Last week, Maddocks law firm conducted an end-of-year summary of its workplace relations issues and a forecast for 2025. Occupational health and safety (OHS) are almost inseparable from industrial relations (IR), so the overlaps between the four or five topics discussed were enlightening and provided a good contrast to the information from other law sources.
Recently, Lisa Ronson died in a vehicle incident on her Victorian farm. Much has already been written about her family’s loss, Lisa’s life and the impact on the community. This article is not about her; it is about how her death has been presented in the media over the last few days and the words used for the means of her death.
For many, her death was brought to our attention by a front-page article in the Herald-Sun newspaper on November 25, 2024 (image below). As an advocate for occupational health and safety (OHS) with a strong interest in farm safety, I read the whole article, and others, looking for details of the incident to contextualise it in the history of farm deaths. The only details were mentioned in the second paragraph:
“….after Ms Ronson was killed in a tragic farm accident on Saturday night, her devastated family is mourning the loss of a cherished wife and mother.”
[The following article discusses suicide]
In November 2024, Victorian Coroner John Cain said:
“”While our early research suggests that Victoria’s suicide rate has not increased overall, it is troubling that we continue to see no sustained reduction in lives lost.”
Cain has instigated a research program with the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne to provide a better understanding of suicide trends and rates. An understanding supported and queried by an article (paywalled) in The Weekend Australia written by journalist Stephen Corby.
