Safety of Work vs the Safety of Work
Most of what we do in the name of safety in Queensland mining is just safety work and does not make the mine safer.
THE EVIDENCE
Four things we do that don't work.
Take 5s
A controlled trial found no evidence they improve planning, heedfulness, education, or hazard ID. Workers batch them, pre-fill them in the ute, fill them in for each other. Rae calls it the "Not for Me" effect —useful for someone else, never for me.
Risk assessments done after the decision
"Unless you have a time machine, risk assessments cannot directly drive risk reduction." —Drew Rae. Most JSAs I review are utter crap —more likely to prove in an investigation that it was tick-and-flick.
TRIFR & LTI dashboards
Month-to-month changes are statistically indistinguishable from noise. Not "mildly noisy" —literally noise. Boards "gain an understanding" of safety from random variation dressed up as a trend.
The clutter itself
Every incident adds paperwork. We never take anything away. And every safety activity that takes a supervisor off the floor is making work less safe, not more.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
We're about to hit 1 June 2026 with safety systems so full of safety work that there's no room left for the safety of work.
CCM —done properly —requires the opposite.
It requires us to be ruthless about what a critical control actually is, what "working" actually looks like, and how we verify it.
You can't do that inside a system buried in cards, audits, pre-starts, forms, and dashboards that everyone privately knows aren't doing anything.
You can't do that inside a system buried in cards, audits, pre-starts, forms, and dashboards that everyone privately knows aren't doing anything.
FOUR QUESTIONS
CMOs, SSEs & company officers:
- Can you name three pieces of safety work on your site that you'd bet your own money actually reducethe risk of a fatality? If you can —why aren't you doing more of those and less of everything else?
- If you removed a piece of safety work tomorrow, would anyone be able to demonstrate the risk went up? If not —what was it actually doing?
- How much of your board's monthly safety report is signal, and how much is month-to-month noise?
- If you asked your supervisors what the stupidest thing they do every day is —and meant it —what would they say? And what's stopping you from asking?
Less safety work. More safety of work.
