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 …
Many people in Australia are asking why any woman would consider a career in the military, given the considerable risk of sexual harassment, abuse and assaults. Occupational health and safety (OHS) and risk management disciplines often draw on many of the risk assessment processes and principles from the defence forces; however, there appear to be …
In January 2025, Kilvington Grammar was fined over $100,000 for breaches of occupational health and safety (OHS) laws related to the death of one of its students, 16-year-old diabetic Lachlan Cook, who was on an overseas school trip. The best source of publicly available reports on this case appears to be the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This article …
“If it cannot be done safely, it should not be done at all.” I have heard this phrase repeatedly over the last 12 months in particular. It is a truth, but it also avoids all of the flexibility our occupational health and safety (OHS) laws, institutions and interpretations have allowed for decades. Perhaps our tolerance …
John Brogden‘s book Profiles in Hope sounds like it is about suicide, but it is about much more than that. His interviews with a broad group of Australians, some very prominent, say a lot about growing up, anxiety, depression, distress, trauma and, sometimes, suicide, but it is primarily about hope. This is not a book about …
Our understanding of stress continues to evolve even though it seems to be splintering into mental health. mental illness, psychosocial harm, mental well-being and more. Recently Orla T. Muldoon of the University of Limerick published “The Social Psychology of Trauma- Connecting the Personal and the Political”. I dipped into this book and found some information pertinent …
For many years, occupational health and safety (OHS) has been fixated on “Culture” as an encompassing term for what management activity does not work and what does. The focus has faded slightly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, Culture made an important reappearance this week with the delivery of the final report of Australia’s Royal Commission …
