The NSW Government has launched a new attack on the unacceptably high death and injury rate in the state's workplaces. In 2004-05 there were 125 deaths and 50,000 serious injuries in work-related incidents in NSW.
The new campaign is a multimedia blitz, Homecomings, and is based on a successful Victorian campaign last year, punching the message that work safety is about coming home to your family. If you are injured or killed at work your loved ones and friends bear the emotional and other consequences as much as you suffer.
This psychological tilt at work safety attitudes targets a great weakness: one of the hardest attitudes to create at work is to have everyone thinking about safety every moment of every day. Injuries and deaths too often occur because of inexplicable lapses of safety attitude.
Accident case studies groan with such instances. A big trick in work safety is to achieve a 100 per cent safety focus all day every day. Homecomings says: "For your families' sake, think safe".
If work safety is to be improved, state governments need to learn from each other. Best practice needs to be repeated across Australia. But this is where NSW needs to learn a lot more.
The Homecomings campaign in Victoria emerged from a 2004 sea change in Victorian work safety laws. This produced a big shift in the approach of the Victorian WorkCover Authority to how it relates to businesses and workers on safety.
Before 2004 Victoria had experimented with highly aggressive prosecutions against employers. Because work safety is such an emotional issue, often the reaction is to blame someone. This reaction reasons that employers always cause work safety incidents and that tough laws and aggressive prosecutions are needed to scare employers into behaving.
This is the policy approach used in NSW. It's the design feature of NSW work safety legislation and is the force underpinning NSW prosecutions. But after much public debate Victoria rejected this approach. The 2004 Victorian laws are built around the recognition that everyone at work contributes to safety. The laws hold everyone, employers and employees, equally responsible over what they control. Prosecutions target everyone who may have contributed to a safety breach.
Further, the Victorian laws removed legal blockages to the WorkCover Authority's capacity to advise and help business with work safety procedures. Co-operation rather than aggression is seen as the first, essential part of a total package to improving work safety. Out of this new approach the creative Homecomings campaign was born.
But the NSW approach of aggressive, fearsome attacks against business is at odds with Victoria's. So obsessed is NSW with instilling employer fear that natural criminal justice has been stripped from the system. Occupational health and safety criminal prosecutions impose presumption of guilt, apply unachievable criteria for proving innocence and deny full rights to appeal or trial before jury.
This stripping of justice is justified on the grounds of needing to obtain convictions regardless of safety behaviour, to create a culture of employer fear. Academic literature on the topic openly promotes this. But inevitably injustices occur under such a regime.
Many cases have emerged of clearly blameless persons being convicted. Irregularities in prosecution processes have been documented. And the judiciary is concerned. A senior NSW judge recently described one prosecution as "constituting more than prosecution and amounting to persecution of the defendants", said the prosecutor had acted "inappropriately", and argued for fixing of the laws and the sacking of the NSW WorkCover Authority as the Government's prosecuting department.
Last year the Government seemed to recognise the problem. It tried to reform the laws but NSW unions campaigned against them. The Government backed down and the laws and culture of employer-hate on work safety remain. Co-operation and guidance as the first benchmark for safety are not part of the NSW Occupation Health and Safety system design or practice.
NSW is at a threshold on work safety. The Homecomings campaign is a great initiative. But the Victorian ads are underpinned by a realistic and practical approach to achieving better work safety cultures. NSW does not have this. The NSW campaign may fail because it's marketing spin lacks policy substance.
For work safety's sake, NSW needs to take the next step and fix its laws.
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