Evaluating mine safety legislation in Queensland

For historical and arguably pragmatic reasons, the mining industry in Queensland has always been the subject of a separate OHS regulatory regime, enforced by an independent mines inspectorate. One consequence of this separation of mining from mainstream OHS has been to isolate the industry from legislative and regulatory developments elsewhere. What became regarded as “best practice regulation” as regards OHS generally was largely ignored by the mining sector, its policy makers and its regulators, who continued to adopt forms of regulation which “mainstream” regulators had long rejected as unlikely to reduce levels of work related injury and disease to anything approaching acceptable levels.2 However belatedly, all this is now changing. Statutory changes were made in Queensland in 1999 with the introduction of the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act 1999 (QLD) (CMSHA 1999) and the Mining and Quarrying Safety and Health Act 1999 (QLD) (MQSHA 1999). It is these statutes that are the principal subject matter of this working paper, which has three purposes: (i) to provide an overview of the traditional approach to mine safety regulation and its limitations; (ii) to describe the main features of the new generation of mine safety legislation in Queensland; and (iii) to critically evaluate contemporary arrangements and identify what further reforms may be desirable. However, it does not purport to address either the role of worker participation, or enforcement and penalties

Asbestos-Related Diseases and Workers' Compensation

Although exposure to asbestos at work can give rise to incapacitating and often fatal diseases, there are significant obstacles for workers in claiming compensation for asbestos-related diseases. Such obstacles include the long latency of the disease, the need to establish causation many years after exposure, and the fact that individual workers may have been exposed to asbestos with multiple employers and/or in multiple jurisdictions. With the legacy of disease from past and present asbestos exposure expected to continue for some decades to come, there is a crucial need to address the obstacles to workers, and their families, receiving fair and adequate compensation. This article examines how asbestos-related diseases have been compensated in Australia, and how the Commonwealth, state and territory workers' compensation schemes might be reformed to facilitate compensation. The article clarifies the often conflicting interests of workers and employers (and their respective representatives), discusses alternative models for compensation in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and explains options for national legislation, national uniformity or consistency in Australian schemes. The article evaluates alternative approaches with reference to the criteria of effectiveness, efficiency, equity and political acceptability, and proposes a strategy for reform based on uniform provisions specific to asbestos-related disease compensation

Safety Regulation and the Mining Inspectorate – Lessons From Western Australia

This paper examines the role of mining regulation and its enforcement, principally in Western Australia. It begins by describing the activities of the Mines Inspectorate and then raising a series of concerns relating to the limitations of the regulatory status quo. In particular it examines the extent to which the Department of Industry and Resources (DoIR) inspectors rely on detailed prescriptive requirements to the detriment of performance and systems based approaches; the extent to which the DoIR audit process fails to monitor adequately the effectiveness of OHS management systems; the extent to which DoIR inspectors failed to consult adequately with worker representatives; the limitations of the inspectorate’s current approach to enforcement action; and whether the inspectorate was sufficiently independent of the companies it regulated. It concludes with some broader reflections in response to the DoIR’s vision of best regulatory practice, and by raising some practical issues concerning the lack of adequate regulatory resources.

Cotton, health and environment: a case study of self-regulation

The Australian cotton industry confronts a range of serious occupational health and environmental challenges, many of which relate to the use and misuse of agricultural chemicals. This article asks which policy instruments are likely to be most effective and efficient in addressing those challenges? Is government regulation a credible option or would industry self-regulation achieve better results? Is there a role for safety. Health and environmental management systems or is some other option, or combination of options, likely to achieve better economic and health and environmental outcomes? More broadly, given the substantial threats to the cotton industry's legitimacy (and indirectly to its economic viability) resulting from its tarnished environmental image, how might the industry best preserve its 'social license' and rebuild trust and credibility with key stakeholders? The answers to these questions will have broader resonance than to the cotton industry alone. The industry provides a classic example of the health and environmental challenges that confront high input, intensively irrigated agriculture and other industries that have aroused a high degree of public concern concerning their health and environmental impact. The ways it has reacted to the pressures it faced and sought through voluntary environmental management arrangements (VEMAs), to protect both its 'social license' and its economic viability, contain important lessons for many other industry sectors that will, sooner or later, confront similar health, environmental and economi

Mobilising Civil Society: Can the Climate Movement Achieve Transformational Social Change

Recognising how close humankind is to precipitating dangerous climate change, activists are seeking strategies to achieve transformational social change. But are they there yet? This article asks: what are the most important steps that grassroots climate activist groups would need to take to achieve that goal? The article’s initial focus is on the global fossil fuel divestment movement, a leader in contemporary grassroots activism. It argues that the movement will only realise its potential when it engages in broader networks and alliances, overcomes the psychological ‘hard wiring’ that makes people resistant to climate change bad news, and engages in ‘big organising’. However, the movement’s greatest contribution will be as part of broader ‘webs of influence’ involving multiple actors and agendas and a diversity of strategies and mechanisms. It argues that these can play important roles in steering events on the global stage. It concludes that while states and international agreements will be crucial to achieving a low carbon future, bottom up approaches driven by advocacy organisations and their allies and wider networks and webs of influence are also important, not least in stimulating changes in beliefs and norms, and through this, in influencing behavioural change

Best practice rail safety regulation

Regulating rail safety, and in particular, achieving regulatory best practice, is no easy task. The disaggregation and privatisation of the rail system, and the broader industry restructuring that took place in the 1990s have produced an industry that is structurally diverse, characterised by technological and corporate complexity and subject to competitive pressures as never before. Moreover, the multiplicity of different rail organisations that has emerged from this process – ranging from large, sophisticated commercial operators through to small heritage railways - has resulted in considerable variation in available resources, skills, experience and understanding, and in safety performance itself. There is much evidence to suggest that there are serious deficiencies both in the rail industry’s approach to safety and in the regulatory response to it, although the nature of these deficiencies varies considerably from State to State. In New South Wales, the Glenbrook and Waterfall accidents highlighted a series of major problems that (according to Hopkins analysis of the Glenbrook enquiry) include: a rule focussed culture [which] tended to deaden awareness of risks; the organisational and occupationally fragmentation of the railway system; a powerful culture of punctuality - of ‘on time running’ - whose side effect was to undermine safety; a railway culture that was profoundly risk blind, even risk denying; and a rail culture that disempowered its employees. Victoria too, although it has not experienced the same sorts of high profile accidents as New South Wales, nevertheless confronts safety and regulatory problems of considerable magnitude. For example, in 2004 a Department of Infrastructure report documented the absence of any sustained improvement in rail incident trends and a number of serious rail incidents that have exposed deep deficiencies in the current regulatory system. According to the Report, the latter include: the absence of any clear definition of the respective responsibilities of the industry and the Safety Regulator; no explicit obligation to demonstrate that a Safety Management System (SMS) is capable of systematically and continually controlling and minimising the risks that have been identified and assessed by a rail organisation; inadequate specification within the SMS and no mandated performance standard for its scope or quality; a lack of penalties for disregarding non-conformance or non-compliance reports, and a lack of guidance for industry and the regulator for the conduct of safety investigations. The limitations of safety arrangements in other jurisdictions are less well documented but there is reason to believe that they are also, for the most part, substantial. More broadly, it is doubtful whether either the industry or government has come to terms with the implications of privatisation or the shift from “largely Government owned entities, which often combined the roles of policy maker, regulator and service deliverer … [to] privatised or corporatised entities [which] have to some extent separated these roles”.7 Nor have effective measures been taken to re-create a safety culture within the industry, notwithstanding that the disaggregation of the rail system in the 1990s was “largely responsible for the destruction of the previously existing safety culture, which was ‘fundamental’ to maintaining optimal safety”. Couple all this with the industry’s inherent vulnerability to high severity albeit low probability, accidents, and the extent of the regulatory challenge, is easy to grasp. That challenge involves essentially three issues: (i) what sort of standards should be imposed upon rail enterprises; (ii) what role(s) should the regulator take with regard to enforcement; and (iii) what roles should there be for workers and third parties. We address these issues in the following sections, with a particular focus on the first two questions, which in the context of the contemporary rail industry in Australia are both controversial and crucial to its future safety performance. In doing so, we assume the goals of rail safety regulation to include (as specified by the National Transport Commission): public trust; the safety of rail users, the general public and rail employees; the need to balance safety and efficiency; and to deliver regulatory oversight at lowest possible cost, to which we would add continuous improvement and best industry practice. This article is a synthesis. It draws on the author’s own work on occupational health, major hazard facilities and environment regulation, on that of colleagues at Regulatory Institutions Network at Australian National University most notably, Elizabeth Bluff, Andrew Hopkins and Christine Parker, and on recent reports on rail safety regulation, in seeking to develop a framework for best practice rail safety regulation

A Cluster of Mistrust: Safety in the Mining Industry

This article examines the relationship between mistrust, adversarial industrial relations and safety performance in 10 Australian coal mines, across three mining companies. Based on case study research and company safety data, the article identifies a 'cluster of characteristics' closely associated with the formation of mistrust, and examines the negative impact such characteristics can have on safety performance. The article considers the broader ramifications of these findings for non-mining sectors, in particular for companies with a corporate head office overseeing separate sites, and identifies ways of building trust

Building Norms from The Grassroots Up: Divestment, Expressive Politics and Climate Change

The fossil fuel divestment movement is at the forefront of civil society initiatives to raise public consciousness about the need for a ‘fossil free’ future. Through the lens of the social movement literature, this article shows how the movement has harnessed grassroots activists, engaged in innovative and sometimes disruptive forms of protest and used cognitive framing and symbolic politics to gain media interest and persuade the public of the importance and legitimacy of its claims and to promote a new social norm. The relative instrumental, structural and discursive power of the protagonists is also examined, showing how, notwithstanding the industry’s deeply embedded structural and instrumental power, the movement has managed to shift the contest onto a terrain where it holds a comparative advantage. Finally, the movement’s role in non-state climate governance is considered, taking account of its interactions with and impact on a range of other climate actors and concluding that climate governance is not only an instrumental or pragmatic process of mandating changes in behavior, but an expressive and symbolic one of nurturing a new norm and institutionalizing a new set of moral principles