A recent occupational health and safety (OHS) prosecution over a quad bike fatality gained some mainstream media attention, primarily due to one of the owners being an independent New South Wales politician, Helen Dalton. Strip out the political newsworthiness, and there are some serious OHS lessons for all employers to be learned from the Court judgement.
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.
Every time a sporting body is confronted with concussion data, someone inevitably asks whether the game can be played without the risk. In most industries, that question is the starting point for a “so far as is reasonably practicable” (SFAIRP) analysis. In sport, it’s treated as heresy. But if we apply the same occupational health and safety (OHS) logic to Australian rules football that we apply to construction, mining or manufacturing, the answer is, if you want to eliminate concussion and the risks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), you have to eliminate the mechanisms that cause it. And once you do that, you no longer have the game as we know it.
The death of 23‑year‑old footballer Nick Lowden should force the Australian Football League (AFL) and every sporting body that claims to care about player welfare to confront the fact that the risks of brain injury in Australian football are no longer mysterious, emerging, or debatable. They are foreseeable, documented, and cumulative. And once a risk is foreseeable, the occupational health and safety (OHS) duty to eliminate or minimise it so far as is reasonably practicable (SFAIRP) applies.
A Four Corners investigation to be broadcast on June 29, 2026, examines Lowden’s death. (This article is based on some preliminary reporting on the issue by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
One of my ongoing frustrations — and this blog is a good example — is that occupational health and safety (OHS) is rarely read or heard outside its own bubble. Yet OHS cannot fix OHS problems on its own. We depend on HR, engineers, accountants, risk managers, IT specialists and others, but we almost never get these disciplines in the same room, hearing the same information, facing the same hazards, and designing solutions together.
A recent HR interview with Dr Kat Page offers a useful example.
Another major company, KPMG, has been caught out in unethical behaviour, lies and mismanagement, only a few years after PwC’s scandal and not long after the damning Banking and Finance Royal Commission. These are the very institutions we are told to treat as exemplars of leadership and governance. Their repeated failures should force employers to question the advice they receive from these firms, including on occupational health and safety (OHS), psychosocial risk and organisational culture.
The Human Resources and Human Rights sectors in Australia are increasingly realising how useful the occupational health and safety (OHS) structures, laws and processes can be to preventing harm related to bullying, sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Recently, a joint presentation by Dr Rachel Cox from Canada and Associate Professor Belinda Smith from Australia (pictured above) highlighted this cross-sectoral awakening.
