On 7 August 2012, the Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu, verbally attacked the Federal Government over its COAG program and lack of support for productivity initiatives. The criticism of productivity sounded odd as the Victorian Government has dropped out of the reform program for occupational health and safety laws yet OHS is understood to have a positive effect on … Continue reading “OHS – the missing element in productivity debate”
With the change of political heart from some of Australia’s state governments over the harmonisation of occupational health and safety laws, many academic and legal publishers revised their book plans as the national market was less national. However, some continued to publish understanding that although OHS harmonisation had a political deadline of 1 January 2012, … Continue reading “New book on OHS laws challenges current understandings of workplace safety”
The latest set of transcripts from Australia’s Parliamentary Inquiry into Workplace Bullying has been released to the public. Again, the public hearings provide important insights, not necessarily into the hazard of workplace bullying, but the perception of the hazard of workplace bullying. The transcript of the public hearing in Hobart starts with a presentation from … Continue reading “Bullying Inquiry hears about psychopaths, enforcement and ‘hush money’”
As the relevance of Leadership encroaches on the workplace safety discipline, so do supportive concepts and techniques such as transformational conversations. There is little doubt that such concepts are applicable to improving safety management and worker safety, even if, to some extent, these concepts are old wisdom rebranded into modern lingo. Safety conversations can, and … Continue reading “Safety is unlikely to improve without a transformational conversation”
Occupational safety advice and incident investigations are peppered with the need to have an improved workplace culture. In some ways, workplace culture is another, and broader, way of saying of “system of work”, a concept that has existed in Australian OHS laws for a long time but never received the prominence of clarity it deserved. But how does one develop … Continue reading “Performance Management may be key to building a safe workplace culture”
South Australia still has not passed the Work Health and Safety legislation that would bring it into line with most of the other States of Australia. A major obstacle to the Bill’s progress in the South Australian Parliament is the “dithering” of Independent MP John Darley. On 28 June 2012, Darley spoke to the WHS … Continue reading “John Darley’s delay on Work Health and Safety laws is unproductive”
Just before Christmas in 2009, Dr Yossi Berger speculated for an information network about the safety of quad bikes. He called it QuadWatch. Over two years later, on 13 July 2012, Australia’s Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten announced his own QuadWatch. In the 2009 Croaky Blog, Dr Berger suggested “a network could be called QuadWatch and it would become a clearing house … Continue reading “Australian Government moves on quad bike safety”