Actions in the priority areas will include the following approaches:
Information and awareness
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- It is important to address the perception in some parts of the community that WHS conflicts with business productivity.
- Many businesses (especially small businesses) want clearer guidance on their responsibilities (e.g. psychosocial risks). Building their capacity and willingness to engage effectively in consultation, cooperation, and coordination in developing their approach to WHS is key.
- Effective, coordinated information and awareness campaigns may require collaboration between jurisdictions. Campaigns should be evidence-based and address gaps in knowledge and understanding of WHS.
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- Consult with specific audiences about their communication preferences for WHS information and education to fill gaps in knowledge, including:
- agriculture
- small businesses (including small mines)
- HSRs
- CaLD and vulnerable workers.
- Share the lessons learned from incident analysis and recognised good practice.
- Draw on a wide range of internal and external expertise to produce targeted guidance for industry.
- Present workshops, roadshows and other information sessions to share health and safety knowledge and provide opportunities to learn from collective experience.
- Develop campaigns with guidance to improve WHS awareness and compliance for priority areas as well as promote better worker safety (whole of WorkSafe).
National collaboration
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- Under the Safe Work Australia approach, there has been significant progress in improving national coordination across Australia’s WHS system. While jurisdictions have developed their own WHS strategies or plans, setting out specific priorities, these complement the national strategy.
- There is an opportunity to increase coordination by sharing resources, collaborating on initiatives, and tackling complex challenges that affect all Australian workplaces (e.g. addressing harmful behaviours such as sexual harassment).
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- Work with other regulators, peak bodies, industry, unions and workers in pursuit of good practice WHS regulation.
- Share insights across jurisdictions and industries so successful initiatives can be replicated and scaled for other workplaces.
- Work with researchers to identify emerging WHS challenges.
- Engage with national bodies to better understand impediments to working across jurisdictional lines.
- Contribute to Safe Work Australia initiatives and activities to support and improve the national WHS framework.
Data and intelligence gathering
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- The collation of reliable and timely data allows the identification of trends and patterns.
- Collaboration is encouraged through data-sharing between government, industry, and other stakeholders. This allows current and emerging WHS challenges to be identified, and new insights extracted that support evidence-based policy.
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- Use technological innovations to help drive efficiency and effectiveness, increase transparency, and develop new data and intelligence gathering methods to generate early warning signals about WHS hazards and risks to enable timely action.
- Use digital platforms to improve the way we work, make health and safety information more accessible, provide efficient communication channels, and strengthen stakeholder engagement.
- Collaborate across government, industry, organisations and research communities to ensure that national surveys and other data collection efforts include WHS measures and occupational information where possible.
Health and safety leadership
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- Governments, industry, unions, organisations, and individuals (including PCBUs and workers) all have a leadership role to build a culture of health and safety and embrace systematic ways to manage WHS risks.
- Governments at all levels in Australia can champion leading practice and investment in WHS as model workplaces.
- Regulatory partnerships can support the development of greater capacity and capability across the system.
- As duty holders, PCBUs can invest in organisational capacity and capability to prevent and manage WHS incidents.
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- Develop and refine strategies and action plans to help address systemic WHS challenges or focus on particular groups of workers.
- Liaise with the vocational education and training sector to influence health and safety training to meet future needs.
- Promote the training of officers, managers and supervisors as key leaders in overseeing healthy and safe work.
- Promote and support the role of HSRs.
- Build relationships with professional associations to improve work health and safety (e.g. AIOH, Australian Institute of Health and Safety [AIHS] and Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy [AusIMM]).
Compliance and enforcement
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- A continued strong focus on compliance and enforcement is essential for ensuring PCBUs and other duty holders are meeting their WHS obligations.
- The WHS legislative framework may require updates to keep pace with the changing environment for work and the evolving pressures on workplaces.
- Actions by WorkSafe should support effective and efficient interventions that are exercised when necessary to improve WHS practices.
- A focus on systematic WHS management by WorkSafe will ensure duty holders’ compliance in line with the intent of regulation.
- The Compliance and enforcement policy promotes a clear framework for engagement as well as a consistent approach to compliance and enforcement of WHS laws.
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- Ensure WorkSafe staff have the skills, knowledge, qualifications and professional development to deliver high-quality regulatory services.
- Use regulatory tools appropriate to the risk and consequences.
- Allocate resources to optimise effectiveness and efficiency.
- Target compliance and enforcement campaigns to high risk sectors, including the high-risk sectors identified in this strategy and others that emerge.
- Develop insights from data on prosecutions, notifications and breaches.
- Strengthen compliance on consultation, representation and supervision to improve worker health and safety.
- Collaborate with other jurisdictions to improve compliance across supply chains of goods and labour.
- Put systems in place to ensure the most appropriate regulator has the lead in matters where there is more than one regulator.
