Victoria is developing its own Code of Practice for managing (and hopefully preventing) psychosocial hazards in the workplace, ahead of amendments to its occupational health and safety (OHS) laws in late 2025. But how powerful and enforceable can a Code of Practice be? A new book by Arie Freiberg, “Regulation in Australia“, helps explain this, but the future could look better.
Sometimes you need to stop what you’re doing and reflect. This could relate to life, work, values or more. I was invited to talk to the Central Safety Group (CSG) this week on “Challenging Mainstream OHS Views”, so I stopped, thought, and jotted down some personal opinions to discuss. It was a helpful exercise.
Occupational health and safety (OHS) podcasts are increasingly common. They are reaching peak-podcast just as peak-blog may have done a few years ago, BUT the increased attention to workplace psychological health continues to create more. A new, short, informative, and useful one is “Inside Safety” with lawyers Steve Bell and Nerida Jessup.
On June 3 2025, workers’ compensation insurer EML released its white paper on mental health in Australian workplaces. The paper is full of recent data on worker perceptions of psychological health; however, its significance is limited by relying on self-reported survey data. More interesting information came from the Question and Answer panel session at the report’s Melbourne launch.
“WFH is probably good for productivity” was a headline in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) of May 29 2025. The online version (paywalled) added “if it’s part-time”. The Productivity Commission‘s examination of the COVID-19 pandemic in its “before-and-after” report presents some new perspectives on occupational health and safety (OHS) aspects of working from home.
Over the last couple of decades, the Workplace Health and Safety Show has evolved from a trade show tacked onto occupational health and safety (OHS) conferences to an independent entity. But is it any good? I spent a few hours there last week to find out.
The Workplace Health and Safety Show is a two-day event that travels to major Australian capital cities each year. Its origin was as a trade show that accompanied OHS conferences, offering a clearly commercial counterpoint to the regulators and academic presentations at the conferences. The challenge in attracting conference delegates was that they had usually paid big money to attend the conference and needed to make a trade-off between their commitment to the conference and the opportunity to stroll the trade show. Other than lunchtime, the conferences rarely allocated enough time for the trade shows, which are an important part of demonstrating the practical application of many of the concepts presented at the conference.
Continue reading “From Sidekick to Spotlight: WHS Show Steps Up, But a Few Big Players are missing”No one wants to experience another pandemic, yet our governments seem uninterested in preparing for the next inevitable one. Australia was relatively lucky in its death rates, but the COVID-19 pandemic and the government-imposed lockdowns have changed some citizens mentally and philosophically. Vaccines arrived comparatively quickly, an amazing story in itself, reducing the emphasis on quarantine as an essential (engineering) control.
In 2021, Geoff Manuagh and Nicola Twilley wrote about the history and future of quarantine in a book called “Until Proven Safe“. The book is a useful reminder of our responses to global pandemics and the overlap of occupational and public health.
