The Noggin Blog

In the last decade, Australia and New Zealand launched broad-based reforms to retool their occupational health and safety systems. Australia implemented a rigorous harmonisation regime: its commonwealth Model Work Health and Safety Act now forms the basis of the majority of state WHS laws. New Zealand, then, used Australia’s Model Act as the basis for its regulations.

Nowadays, most jurisdictions impose a strict duty of care obligation on employers. In other words, employers must provide a baseline level of care for their employees, i.e. ensure security and safety. That requirement, however, doesn’t just apply to employees working within the four walls of the traditional office; it also extends to lone workers. 

The Crown agency in charge of housing services in New Zealand, Housing New Zealand (HNZ) has been around since the early 2000s.

A run-through of what happened

How prepared are organizations to tackle critical issues and major crises? That’s the question we at Noggin alongside our partner Deloitte posed to invited customers in an inaugural series of breakfast seminars exploring the theme of overconfidence and crisis preparedness.

By now, we’re all aware of the growing contractor footprint on the modern workforce. In the U.S., for instance, recent projections show that contractors will constitute half of the labor force within the decade.

Twenty-nine miners perished in the tragic Pike River Mine explosion in 2010, one of the worst workplace health and safety disasters in the history of modern New Zealand. The crisis proved a watershed for the country, a catalyst for overhauling its ineffective, occupational health and safety system.

The Case of Australia and New Zealand

Like most advanced economies, Australia and New Zealand relied heavily on substances now deemed hazardous during industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, both countries now have relatively high, per-capita rates of hazardous waste. In response, both countries have installed relatively stringent regulatory regimes to safeguard environmental and worker safety. But some of those regimes have changed recently. This blog will provide an overview of recent changes in hazardous waste regulations.

You’ve read it before, but the nature of the modern workforce is changing and it’s changing fast. Nowadays, most companies, whether a Fortune 500 firm, a gritty start up, or a mom and pop, will employ third-party contractors to perform any number of essential business tasks.