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Secretary's Soapbox - October 2005

VTHC Annual OHS Representatives Conference

On Wednesday 26th October, the VTHC conducted its annual OHS Representatives Conference.  Victorian Workcover Minister, John Lenders, opened the conference.  In reply I thanked Minister Lenders for his government’s “ongoing commitment to health and safety in Victorian workplaces”.
I also noted that the conference was “the largest gathering of OHS representatives in the world”.  Representatives came from as far away as Portland, the Latrobe Valley and Cobram.
I told the conference that their deliberations had to be seen in the light of the trade union movement’s concerns about the Howard government’s proposed changes to Industrial Relations laws.
I emphasised that OHS practitioners needed to keep a watching brief on a sub-set of Howard’s IR changes and that was ‘interfering’ in OHS issues.  I noted that the independent, statutory body National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC) had recently been abolished by the Federal Government and replaced by the Australian Safety and Compensation Council (ASCC) and the Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner (Tom Fisher).  Both these bodies simply operate now as part of the bureaucracy of the Department of Workplace Relations, headed up by Minister Kevin Andrews.
It is important that we resist any attempts to water down how we apply OHS in Victoria.
The conference concentrated on a number of themes like stress, bullying and fatigue in the workplace.  Workcover has to ensure, as regulator, that it produces proper rules about how these issues are to be dealt with.
Another theme of the conference addressed the growing use by employers of a range of tools to do with surveillance, testing and even making behavioural observations of employees.  There is an attempt to try to shift the responsibility for OHS from employers onto individual workers, generally.
The VTHC OHS Unit and the OHS Officers of the affiliates did a great job in organising the conference.
Brian Boyd

VTHC Secretary