Guest Post by Dr Rebecca Michalak About couple of weeks ago, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) featured a piece on a law firm that had introduced a mandatory approach to reporting sexual harassment – referred to as a ‘no bystanders’ rule. To be clear upfront, here is my disclaimer – I am not directly commenting … Continue reading “‘No Bystanders Rule’ Bullshit”
Statistics are vital to any decisions about occupational health and safety (OHS). Safe Work Australia (SWA) does a great job providing statistical packages based on the data sources it can access. Last week SWA released its 2019 report on “Work-related Traumatic Injury Fatalities” which identified vehicle collisions as, by and large, the most common cause …
Recently the Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) conducted an online conference under the title SafeFest. The intention was to challenge the established orthodoxy of workplace health and safety. One of the conference’s first speakers was David Whitefield talking about safety as a “wicked problem”. It is a perspective that occupational health and safety …
Australian farm safety received several boosts last week. FarmSafe Australia released new report on agricultural injury and fatality trends. The Victorian Government gave the Victorian Farmers Federation more money to fund farm safety inspectors, again. And the Agriculture Minister established a Farm Safety Council of the usual agricultural groups. It is hard not to take …
So, Victoria now has Industrial Manslaughter laws. Now what? Within days of the activation of these laws a worker died at the Thales worksite in Bendigo. This location is covered by the Federal Work Health and Safety laws, but this has not stopped social media from mentioning Industrial Manslaughter. It seems now that every work-related …
Dr Ciaran McAleenan CEng MICE is the Chair of Institution of Civil Engineers Expert H&S Panel and Lecturer at Ulster University. Ciaran and I have been reading each other for some time and watching many of the same occupational health and safety (OHS) changes. He admitted that some of the questions were challenging, the simplest of … Continue reading “OHS and Ciaran McAleenan”
In March 2020, several Victorian universities and others were proud to announce their being provided government grants to “…. transform how buildings are designed and manufactured in Australia”. Given that safety in Design of buildings has been an ongoing initiative for many years, several questions on this topic were sent through to the Interim CEO …
