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.
For the last 5 months I have been living and working on Norfolk Island, an external territory of Australia, three hours by plan off the east coast of Australia. I am on a 6-month contract which concludes in just over a week.
I have written regularly over the psychological impacts of Fly-in, Fly-Out (FIFO) workers and looked at this contract as an extreme example of working away from home and being isolated from friends and family. So how do I think I have coped?
So Ben Carroll is the new Premier of Victoria. He has made the obvious and unavoidable decision to call for a Royal Commission into that state’s construction sector and the government’s “Big Build” project. But Carroll was also the Minister for WorkCover for several years. He spoke at safety awards nights, conferences, seminars and Workers’ Memorial events. At those events, he made several clear statements about the importance of occupational health and safety (OHS).
OHS remains invisible in political debate unless people die. Politicians will talk about productivity, investment, innovation and community renewal, but they rarely talk about preventing workers from being killed, injured or psychologically harmed. When OHS does appear, it is usually framed as a cost burden rather than a social benefit. Yet every political promise about fairness, renewal, or community well-being carries an implied OHS benefit if anyone bothers to look.
The United Kingdom and Europe are again struggling through dangerous summer heat. In Australia, it’s tempting to feel a little smug. We’ve spent decades adapting our houses, cities and work practices to heat: wide‑brimmed hats in schools, backyard pools, ventilation, shade, job rotation, and a long list of practical controls that employers and regulators understand well. None of this makes heat safe, but it does make working in excessive heat manageable.
Into this UK heatwave steps Greens MP Hannah Spencer, proposing a Private Member’s Bill to establish a maximum workplace temperature.
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.
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.
