innovation – SafetyAtWorkBlog

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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Procurement as Safety Policy? The ACT’s Construction Culture Experiment

The culture standard for the construction industry has been discussed for several years. Trials have been conducted, and the results were positive, but the value of this standard has always depended on someone powerful implementing it in practice. Last year the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government embedded it into public-project procurement, arguing that government purchasing power can drive improvements in wellbeing, diversity and psychological safety across the construction sector.

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Socioeconomic Determinants of Organisational Behaviour

The Systemic and Socioeconomic Drivers of Bullying that Employers Keep Ignoring

Workplace bullying and harassment are often described as interpersonal problems, such as a clash of personalities, a difficult manager, or a “bad apple” who spoils the barrel. This framing is convenient, familiar, and wrong. Bullying is not an individual defect. It is a systemic outcome produced by organisational structures, cultural norms, and socioeconomic pressures that make harmful conduct predictable. If employers continue to treat bullying as a behavioural characteristic rather than a structural hazard, they will keep missing the causes and potential controls, and fail to meet their legislative duty of care.

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Rediscovering the “Radical” Power of Ordinary Conversation

Day one of PHSCon felt less like the unveiling of a new paradigm and more like a reminder that the fundamentals of good work have been obvious for a long time. The opening session positioned the conference as part of a broader push to move beyond bare compliance and towards more humane, evidence‑based ways of organising work. Conference chair and author Dr Kat Page set the tone by describing how her book Good Work emerged from watching COVID‑era decisions about job design, workload and leadership either amplify or buffer psychological harm. She framed both the book and the conference as an attempt to offer collective agency and hope, a space where practitioners, leaders and academics could connect stories, research and practice in ways that make better work design feel possible rather than theoretical. Conference delegates received a free copy of the book.

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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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New Industries, Like AI, Treat Regulation Like an Optional Extra

In the movie “Working Girl”, Melanie Griffith’s character reveals how she connected merger opportunities when flipping through a magazine. Today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR) presented a similar set of thoughts on psychosocial hazards and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This connection had the added heft of quotes from prominent Australian lawyer, Michael Tooma.

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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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