Is Work Health and Safety Harmonisation Still Alive?

In July 2008, an agreement was reached between the Commonwealth and all states and territories within Australia except Western Australia (WA) to begin the process of harmonising Australia’s work health and safety laws. This new model was aimed at reducing red tape and compliance costs for businesses that operate in multiple states. The umbrella laws would also provide workers with equal levels of safety across the nation as well as recognising their licensing and training nationally.

Fast forward to 2013 and what is the state of play? We now have Queensland, Northern Territory, New South Wales, ACT, South Australia and Tasmania all adopting the harmonised model. This leaves just WA and Victoria out of the loop.

WA are still committed to the process and have completed their draft WHS which is expected to be implemented in 2013. WA has also started public consultation on the Regulations in August 2012 and will be working through this process in 2013.

This leaves Victoria. The last communication on the WorkSafe website stated that Victoria would not adopt the national legislation. The reason for this stance is an expected $3.4 billion cost over five years with no perceived benefit in terms of safety levels.

So what does this mean for harmonisation? Do you believe it will still be successful without the involvement of Victoria? Do you believe that Victoria will eventually join the rest of the states and adopt national safety legislation or stay with their own set of rules?

How often should risk assessments be reviewed?

A common question associated with machine safety is, how often does the machine’s risk assessment need to be reviewed? In the past each state and territory had its own Act, Regulations and Code of Practice, which had slightly different requirements. Some legislation, such as NSW Regulations 2001, states that some risk assessments should be reviewed every 5 years. Another document released by the Queensland government titled “Guide to Safeguarding common Machinery & Plant” indicated that risk management should be reviewed once every 12 months.

The national Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation was planned to remove these differences by providing a uniform set of Act, Regulations and Code of Practice for all states and territories. Unfortunately this hasn't been adopted by all states this year. The following guidance comes from the Safe Work Australia Code of Practice, “How to Manage Work Health and Safety Risks.”

The process of Risk Management, which includes risk assessment, is an ongoing process that may be triggered when:

• Starting a new business
• Changing work practices, procedures
• Purchasing new equipment
• New information on risks becomes available
• An incident occurs
• Workers, health and safety representative or others raise concerns
• WHS regulation specify the need for specific hazards

My question would be; if none of the above events occur, when should the existing risk controls be reviewed?

Reliability Data for Safety Devices

With the transition from Safety Categories to Performance Levels (PL) or Safety Integrity Levels (SIL) in international machine safety standards, product reliability has become a quantifiable requirement. Both the methods for design to PL and SIL require reliability to be calculated for devices used in the safety control system.

Guidance is given in ISO 13849-1:2006 clause 4.5.2, which states the following hierarchy of obtaining reliability values:

1. Manufacturer’s data
2. Use Annex C and D in the standard
3. Choose 10 years

Most manufacturers are now supplying Mean Time To Dangerous Failure (MTTFd) or B10d for their safety components and the tables supplied in the standard offer good guidance for components where manufacturer data isn’t available. However both these data sources require the components to be used in the correct environmental conditions.

How can designers obtain reliability data for real world conditions where temperature, dust, vibration, direct sunlight, etc may adversely affect the lifetime of their components?

Searching on the internet I can find many references for process safety components and installations. Organisations such as Exida publish handbooks for reliability of different components in varying installations, based on real world results. These would be useful for machine safety but are biased towards process components and conditions. Are there such publications specific for machine safety? This would be a useful resource for designers of machine safety systems in harsh or extreme conditions.


For more information be sure to contact our team of safety specialists.