History of WHS in Australia

Element 1

Identify existing and potential hazards and record them according to workplace procedures.

Contribute to the development of strategies for implementing risk controls in line with workplace procedures and policies.

Implement risk controls in line with the hierarchy of risk control and workplace and legislative requirements.

Identify and report issues with risk controls, including residual risk, in line with workplace and legislative requirements.

History of WHS in Australia

The regulation of WHS in Australia has been heavily influenced by the development of the law in the United Kingdom, and health and safety law has evolved in response to the failure of employers to provide safe working conditions for their employees.

Industrial Revolution

Early efforts to regulate health and safety and the push for regulation were associated with the marked increase in accidents and the appalling workplace conditions of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

Factory Acts

The Factory Acts began early in the 19th century in the United Kingdom. The Factory Acts were a series of Acts passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom to limit the number of hours women and children worked, initially in the textile industry, then later in all industries.

The factory reform movement resulted in a limit on the hours that could be worked in factories and mills. The aim of the movement was for a ‘Ten Hours’ Bill’ to limit a child’s working day to 10 hours. Subsequent Acts were passed in 1937 and 1959.

In 1961, a new Factories Act, consolidated much of the United Kingdom’s workplace health, safety and welfare legislation. The Health and Safety Act superseded it in 1974. The most significant event in the development of health and safety at work legislation in the United Kingdom and Australia was the delivery in 1972 of the Safety and Health at Work report (referred to as the Robens Report). The committee was chaired by Lord Robens. This report identified numerous deficiencies in, and limitations of, the existing laws.

The report stated that the laws were:

• uncoordinated, complex and confusing

• too detailed and prescriptive to be able to be applied across all workplaces

• inflexible and unable to keep pace with technological, social and economic change

• activity rather than outcome focused (compliance would not necessarily mean effective management of risks) • ineffective in enforcing proper conduct by providing maximum penalties for breaches that were so low as to have little or no deterrent effect.

There has been a longstanding belief that many accidents are caused by human error. This has resulted in an approach to accident prevention that focused on changing the behaviour of the worker and teaching them to think about safety.

This approach is universally unsuccessful at preventing accidents. To understand this, it is helpful to explore the historical roots of the ‘careless worker’ myth.