Earlier this year, the Central Safety Group‘s (CSG) monthly guest speaker was Helen O’Keefe, a recruiter. She offered insights into how occupational health and safety (OHS) personnel may be perceived by certain employers. The phrase that pricked my eyes was “blocker”.
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.
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.
If the first lesson from IAWBH2026 was that psychological risks must be treated as system hazards, the second is that most organisations remain structurally ill-equipped to manage them. Despite years of policy development and training initiatives, the evidence presented at the recent International Association on Workplace Bullying and Harassment conference in Canberra showed persistent gaps between intention and outcome.
The IAWBH2026 sessions offered a revealing snapshot of how international practitioners are grappling with bullying, harassment and gendered violence at work—and how closely these discussions align with Australia’s psychosocial‑hazard framework. Several presentations landed squarely within the Australian work health and safety (WHS) model, particularly those that treated these issues as structural hazards requiring organisational controls. Sapphire Parsons’ argument that gendered violence demands primary prevention, equitable decision‑making, and action on power imbalances mirrors the prevention‑first duties under Australian safety law.
However, there were also indications of how far the change has to go.
Continue reading “What was Missing from the Bullying and Harassment Conference?”The 2026 conference for the International Association on Workplace Bullying and Harassment (IAWBH) was held in Canberra in June 2026. I was always curious about how prominent the term “psychosocial hazards” would be at this conference. It seems that most of the world still talks about workplace bullying and harassment and sexual harassment separately from the psychosocial, but the occupational health and safety (OHS) approach seems to be in the ascendant.
Below is my take (part 1 of 2) on the conference sessions I attended and the issues raised. (I missed the half day of Day 3). I have tried to use a generic, informative tone for a broader readership.
I was able to explore the concept of business leadership a little further at the recent conference of the International Association on Workplace Bullying and harassment. Lucienne Ruddenklau presented on ‘Mechanisms through which Leadership influences Workplace Bullying: A Conceptual Review”. I asked her, a leadership researcher, whether Leadership is an honorary title for executives or an adjective for leadership throughout an organisation. Her response was useful, as was her research presentation.
