Certain memories I cannot escape certain OHS memories. They are the ones that inform many of the decisions I make in matters of health and safety. Rightly or wrongly they feed my aspirations, my efforts, frustrations and my anger at what I see too often in many workplaces. What I do and … Continue reading “I wish for an OHS time machine”
The Liberal Party of New South Wales won last Saturday’s State election in a landslide. The New South Wales employer associations are jubilant but the jubilation masks some confusion over OHS reforms. The new NSW government is being urged to act promptly on OHS reform issues particularly by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) … Continue reading “Election excitement masks OHS confusion”
The latest edition of The National Research Centre for Occupational Health and Safety Regulation’s newsletter lists two new working papers, one from Andrew Hopkins and one from Neil Foster. Both should be obligatory reading. Hopkins discusses how to increase the value of the “management walk-arounds” an increasingly common key performance indicator for senior executives. Hopkins, … Continue reading “Managerial OHS walk-arounds and D&O liabilities”
Recently the CEO of the Australian Football League (AFL), Andrew Demetriou addressed a breakfast gathering in Melbourne on the issue of “OHS in the AFL”. He spoke almost entirely about policy initiatives without specifically addressing occupational health and safety but after a while we came to understand he was speaking of OHS from his senior … Continue reading “Australian Football’s corporate approach to OHS”
Participants at the 2010 Safety In Action conference and the 2010 ASSE Conference will be familiar with lawyer, Michael Tooma‘s faith in due diligence to improve safety management in Australia. In the lead-up to his appearance at another Australian OHS conference in October 2010 he has again restated his faith but this largely ignores the changed political context of OHS harmonisation … Continue reading “Tooma takes aim at the Environment Minister over accountability”
The question in the title of this article came about from the release of a fabulous new book by LexisNexis- Butterworths – Australian Labour Law – Text, Cases & Commentary, 5th edition. Through my introductory look at the book, it seems that occupational health and safety gets around half a page in a book of over 1200 … Continue reading “Is OHS part of Labour Law?”
SafeWorkSA has released details of a successful OHS prosecution concerning forklifts, yet again. But the full judgement has more management information than is usual and deserves to be read in full. The circumstances, according to a media release (not yet available online) are “…an incident… in August 2007 in which a 56 year old delivery driver tripped over the tines of a … Continue reading “Lack of separation of pedestrians and forklifts results in $A24k fine”