Australia has held an annual “Go Home on Time Day” for many years, but the amount of unpaid work workers give to their employers and the time their families miss out on remains high. Looking at new data in light of the legislative need for Australian employers to identify and assess psychosocial hazards, there are noticeable changes that employers need to make to comply with their occupational health and safety (OHS) obligations.
The latest edition of New Zealand’s excellent occupational health and safety (OHS) magazine, Safeguard (long may it reign…. in hard copy), included its annual income survey of OHS professionals. Some Australian organisations also do this, but their findings can be expensive to access.
I ran Safeguard’s data summary through AI to provide a text-based profile of a “typical” NZ OHS professional. It offers an interesting contrast to what we have in Australia.
WorkSafe Victoria used to launch National Safe Work Month (or Safe Work Week as it started out) in a big way in Melbourne. They tried something similar when it relocated to Geelong, but this year, there was nothing of the same magnitude. There was some strong publicity benefit from having a big half- to full-day event at the start, but apparently, there was no additional benefit beyond that.
I would argue that the big event for this year’s safety month is the “Psychological Health Regulations: A focus on risk management” webinar on October 27, 2025. The new regulations and Compliance Code are what everyone seems to be talking about. For contrast, I have reviewed some of the presentations from the opening of WorkSafe Week in October 2012 by WorkSafe and VECCI.
I asked an artificial intelligence program to identify Australian instances where politics may have led to institutional changes related to psychosocial hazards. It revealed numerous actions related to government inquiries and activities, but did not address politics as I intended. Clearly, my question needed clarification, but the response remained informative and deserves attention.
This time I asked:
Continue reading “Political Reforms Drive Some Systemic Psychosocial Hazard Changes”“Most Australian discussions of psychosocial hazards appear to focus primarily on causes that can be controlled at work. Is there any activity in the political sphere for institutional changes?”
Senator Jacquie Lambie has been a staunch advocate for improving the occupational health and safety (OHS) of Australia’s defence force personnel. In 2022, she gave a confronting presentation to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, and she continued her advocacy on day 1 of the 48th session of the Australian parliament by asking reasonable questions that could also be posed in non-military industries.
Australia now has a Rural Media Farm Injury Dashboard, which shows the location of agricultural injuries and deaths from 2020 onwards. This is the type of publicly available information required to help reinforce an awareness of the dangers of farm work and demystify and destigmatise occupational health and safety (OHS) in this sector.
There are limitations, though, so one must be careful not to hyperbolise the data.
Note: This article mentions suicide.
This week, a colleague shared with me some bizarre experiences he had while negotiating with his company’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provider for basic data. It reminded me of the EAP role in preventing and managing psychosocial hazards at work. Australia’s psychological health regulations appear to have placed the EAP industry in a state of confusion and transition, which warrants consideration and the perpetual questioning of the effectiveness of EAPs. It may be that the days of the EAP, as traditionally configured, are over.
