CEOs and regulations

The Australian Financial Review conducts many conferences, business summits and CEO surveys to provide publishable content (and as a marketing strategy). Over the last month, several articles and features have been produced from its “Chanticleer CEO Survey”; one is called “Red tape standing between business and Australia’s policy challenges” (hard copy title, paywalled). I scanned the CEOs’ comments for relevance to occupational health and safety (OHS) and harm prevention.

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What should Victoria’s new WorkSafe Minister do now?

The Victoria Premier, Jacinta Allan, reshuffled her Cabinet and recently allocated responsibility for the Workcover and Transport Accident Commission portfolios to Deputy Premier Ben Carroll. This may be the first time a politician of that position has been given these portfolios. But what should Ben Carroll do now?

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Business values and OHS impacts

No one outside occupational health and safety (OHS) talks about OHS. Outside of scandals and disasters, OHS is a fringe consideration, especially in the media—social and mainstream. So, OHS needs to insert itself into mainstream conversations. The column by economics journalist Ross Gittins in The Age newspaper on September 23, 2024, says much about OHS without mentioning it.

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Regulations are guardrails

One of the learnings from the recent report into the Grenfell Tower Fire was the failure of regulations and their enforcement. Much attention was given to many of these failures happening during the UK Government’s “red tape challenge” where two (or more) regulations were removed for every one introduced.

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“…the system isn’t broken. It was built this way” – Grenfell Tower and OHS

The inquiry report into the Grenfell Tower fire has yet to be seriously considered from the other side of the world. However, the report is being mentioned in Australia’s emergency services and fire sectors.  The inquiry has been thoroughly followed and analysed in the United Kingdom, and many excellent summaries have been published in newspapers, books, and podcasts. Australia’s cladding debate has not been to the same extent as the UK. Still, the UK’s structures, policies, processes, business ethics and neglect are certainly mirrored in Australia, which directly impacts how workplace health and safety operates here.

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Digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence, OHS and Work

What do Safe Work Australia (SWA) executives do outside National Safe Work Month? Several times each year, they appear before Senate committees. Recently, SWA’s CEO Marie Boland, Sinead McHugh, and Katherine Taylor spoke at a Senate Inquiry into the Digital Transformation of Workplaces.

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Are wellbeing programs “safe washing” their OHS performance?

First, there was brainwashing, then greenwashing and safewashing. Could the well-being industry be accused of safewashing? Has well-being had its day in the sun?

The first use of safewash to describe presenting occupational health and safety (OHS) information in a diffused truth was in the 2016 research paper by Sharron O’Neill, Jack Flanagan and Kevin Clarke, called “Safewash! Risk attenuation and the (Mis)reporting of corporate safety performance to investors” (abstract/summary available). It has turned up elsewhere since.

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