WHS Legislation: The Glue That Binds Industries

Richard recently had an online session with a PhD candidate from ECU (Edith Cowan University) who was researching the integration of fire engineering and security concerns and how practitioners in the two domains ought to work together.

The session had Richard, as the fire engineer, and an ex-military security consultant. Somewhat to the surprise of the researcher, both Richard and the security adviser firmly agreed on the centrality of the WHS (in Vic OHS) legislation as the glue that bound the two domains together. The diagram that developed during the discussion is shown below.

That is, both the fire engineer and the security consultant agreed that the due diligence obligations of the WHS legislation forced congruence on both domains.

The best way forward was to have competent experts get together and work out what was best in design terms rather than trying to address the problem in silos, which is what was mostly occurring in industry.  

This happened to parallel a discussion Richard recently had with our NZ associate, Dr Frank Stoks, who was acting as an expert witness into the death of a young man in Auckland. And that was that there are always competing objectives to do with foreshore amenity and views, verses a person falling into the water, etc. As a CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) practitioner, Frank held that IPTED (Injury Prevention Through Environmental Design) needs to work together and the only way to do that is to get all the key design players together to thrash out a solution.

Obviously the more complicated the problem the greater the conclave of expert designers would need to be in order to establish the balance of what was reasonable in the circumstances.