Wellbeing programs and resilience training can support employees, but they aren’t a substitute for addressing workplace risks at their source. That was a key message from WorkSafe Victoria’s webinar on psychological health and safety for small and medium businesses.
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.
The “Best Practice Review of the Model Work Health and Safety Laws” report released by Safe Work Australia (SWA) is a lot to digest. Summaries and initial analyses are already appearing on some LinkedIn and law firm posts, but the report needs careful consideration. The recommendations seem sound, but such things almost always trigger a knee-jerk reaction from business groups, driven by ideological objections and concerns about increased business costs. I suspect we will see some of this objection in the media over the next few days.
Earlier this week, I heard a person repeatedly say that Victoria was the last Australian jurisdiction to introduce obligations to prevent psychosocial hazards under occupational health and safety (OHS) laws. That is not strictly true.
Contrary to the established understanding, TWO Australian jurisdictions have not joined the harmonised Work Health and Safety (WHS) model laws: Victoria and Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island employers still regulate occupational health and safety (OHS) under an Act from 1988 created by its own legislative assembly, which existed at that time – the Norfolk Island Employment Act. “Psychosocial hazards” are not mentioned.
Returning to Australia after six months as a health and safety adviser on Norfolk Island has left me thinking hard about what “doing safety” really means in a remote, resource‑tight community. Norfolk Island Regional Council has cycled through several mainland advisers over the years, usually on short contracts and sometimes without an effective handover. That churn created complexity, not culpability. As I wrote in my notes at the time: “There were many safety things the Council could have done differently… but I don’t think it was doing anything wrong.”
The real issue seemed to be differing expectations – what mainland advisers thought was achievable, and what the island’s workforce actually needed.
Based on mainstream media reports of the working-from-home (WFH) debate in Victoria over the last few weeks, Victorian politics has fractured over the proposal to give most employees a right to work from home two days a week. The politics of the WFH initiative came to the fore, even if occupational health and safety (OHS) didn’t.
Day 1 of FlourishDx’s Psych Health and Safety conference ended this year with a flourish, featuring a Family Feud-style contest between Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and Human Resources (HR). It was a raucous conclusion to a day of mixed safety messages.
