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Sustainability Safety and Health at Brookfield Multiplex Australasia
Professor Dennis Else
Group General Manager,
Sustainability Safety and Health at Brookfield Multiplex Australasia
Kylie Emery:
Hi. I'm Kylie Emery, Group Managerof the Workplace Relations Implementation and Safety Group in the Department of Employment. I'm also the Commonwealth Member on the Safe Work Australia Members board.
Thank you for joining us today for a presentation by Professor Dennis Else as part of the Virtual Seminar Series on theAustralian Work Health and Safety Strategy. Firstly, I wish to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we are meeting on, the Ngunnawal people. I acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region.
I am delighted to introduce Professor Dennis Else as today's presenter. Dennis was formerly Dean of Engineering and Science and Pro Vice Chancellor responsible for organisational development and change at the University of Ballarat. He was the Chair of the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission from 1996 to 2002, a predecessor of Safe Work Australia. As the NOHSC Chair, he was instrumental in the development of the National OHS Strategy 2002 to 2012, which is the precursor of the current Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2012 to 2022.
Dennis's contribution to work health and safety is truly inspirational. He developed the first Australian standard for OHS management systems and improved the quality of auditing processes and performance measures. Since 2006, Dennis has combined his academic position with a strong business focus, as the GroupGeneral Manager Sustainability Safety and Health at Brookfield Multiplex Australasia. His role consists not only of increasing the focus on safety across Brookfield Multiplex, but also representing the company as a board member of the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living based at the University of New South Wales.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Dennis Else.
[Audience Applause]
Professor Dennis Else:
Thank you Kylie.
Thank you very much and it's a great honour to be able to reflect on the progress that we've made as a community and the opportunity is quite rare that you get asked to sort of do this reflection on the past, the present and look into the future, and then highlight some challenges and where the opportunities may lay. And in doing that preparation, it was really quite rewarding to see the progress that has been made by us as a community and that's a vast number of people, putting their effort, over a long period of time to improving the health, the safety of people at work.
Now, I think probably what I should just say that is that I've looked at the data and of course, the data is not necessarily very good for working out what we've achieved in the health area -it's much stronger in trauma and in the area of fatalities. I think we've probably in the last 30 years reduced the fatality rate by around about 70% in this country and that's about as good as I’ve seen elsewhere in the world. I think the GermanBerufsgenossenschaften over 30 years got about the same reduction and that was from the '60s through to the '90s and that was a period in which they had this wonderful combination of focus on health and safety, but also productivity and that all done within industry sectors and it was a lovely model that their structure enabled them to use.
We may have achieved a lot but there is still much to do. I mean, if we look at the moment,we've probably got a couple of hundred traumatic fatalities per yearin this country. We've probably got about three times that number - 600 new mesothelioma cases per year and we'veprobably got 10 times the number of traumatic fatalities that are occurring as work related fatalities due to occupational cancers, respiratory disease and other matters that we would put down as 'occupational disease'.So, there is a huge amount of work still to be done. And I think it's really important that the successes that we may have had in targeting trauma are reflected upon and then applied to the real challenge ahead which is in the occupational disease arena.
So, a lot of people have contributed to where we are today and they've contributed over many, many years. If we look at the sort of timeline, for me I don't actually go back to 1830s to reflect, but for me the industrial revolution and then in the wake of that, starting to have inspectorates with a few people riding around on horseback paid for the hay, but other than that, it was appalling amongst those people to do good work, and those early factory inspectors in the United Kingdom, the work going on in Germany and in the United States -very, very important work.
And in those days,there were also a lot of sort of interest in health matters and I wonder why we've not made as much progress in health as I think we have in fatalities, and I think part of it are the difficulties of measurement. And as a Physicist myself, I got into occupational health and safety via physics and an interest in noise and occupational deafness. So for me,the sort of grand old man of occupational disease is Thomas Barr - a Glasgow ear surgeon. I’m married to a wonderful Glaswegian woman - so I can imagine how he may have sounded, but in those days, he couldn't go out, as I was able to, and access specialised equipment for measuring hearing and noise, so he had to improvise.
And the improvisation was to use his pocket watch, and he would just use a pocket watch and a yardstick, wait 'til the person could say they could hear the ticking of the watch, out came the yardstick and measure the inches of hearing, right? So,he had three groups of workers. So it's early epidemiology and he had letter carriers, iron moulders – foundry men- they would be called in those days and most of them were men –boilermakers. In actual fact, it's interesting. I don't think the language was as sexist then because the jobs were all going to men, so you didn't have to specify, use the letter carriers. It's not postmen – iron moulders. It's interesting I think, anyway. But, now the letter carriers, that's not 5,674inches of hearing for one postman. That's distributed across two ears and 100 people, so you're talking of – what's that - about 28 inches away or 70 centimetres. By thetime you get down to the iron moulders, you're down to aboutsix inches - 16 inches rather, or about 40 centimetres, and by the time you're getting to the boilermakers, you're practically squashing it intosome of their ears which is about three and a half inches away on average, sort of nine centimetres.
Now, back in those days they had earplugs. They had disposable earplugs. They had this new material called plasticine that they mixed up with cotton wool and made themselves disposable earplugs. But what they didn't have was real controls of an engineering type ofcontrols at source. It was all down to the individual.
As I say, the letter carriers were probably all men, but the factory inspectors were also all men and over here, it was the same. By about 1893, the first female inspector in the UK was appointed. South Australia of course, always at the leadin innovation, by 1894 had appointed our first female inspector, Augusta Zadow and she was an advocate for women. She set up the first women's trade union over in Adelaide and really did a vast amount of work on the clothing trade and the sweatshops, and she died about 1896 while preparing a report on the earlyFactories Act. Now, she's still commemorated by South Australia's Augusta ZadowScholarship which is sort of introduced on her centenary of her appointment I think, and for anyone that is wishing to apply, it has an interesting sort of requirement that is, it’s for individuals who have contributed to women's health and safety. So, a very, very powerful advocate and I think the trade unions have, over the years, had a very important role to play as advocates of this subject of health and safety.
Now these early pioneers,they were quite quick to recognise that you really wanted to find a control that was sort of upstream and was going to be technical in nature rather than just trying to rely on people to change what they do. And the earliest example I've got is in the work of Sir Thomas Legg who was the first Medical Inspector of factories back in 1897 in the UK, and much later back in the 1930s, so he was probably giving the equivalent of this lecture. They give you the opportunity to speak on these issues before you fall off the perch, you know. And, anyway - he came out with a number of axioms and it's really interesting I think to see what he was wanting to tell people about.
The first one was, "Unless and until the employer has done everything - and everything means a ‘good deal’ - the workmen can do next to nothing to protect himself, although he is naturally willing enough to do his share." So it sort of shows that both need to be playing their part. Secondly, “If you can bring an influence to bear external to the workman, that is one over which he can exercise no control, you'll be successful and if you cannot or do not, you will never be wholly successful.” And so there was this push to go upstream and engineer out problem, and you then had - that got expressed in a number of different ways. By the1930s it was within occupational hygiene. It was called,well, a hierarchy of control and we tended to use that term, and it's embedded in our legislation today.
Now, I think this is really important because it's a lasting legacy of that sort of periodof focus on the technical side.
So now, so the idea is that if you are controlling things by eliminating, substituting, isolating or engineering out, then you've got more effective and more robust controls. If you're relying on administrative controls of personal protection, then you're less robust and you’regoing to need more supervision in order to make sure that that works. I mean, it’s fairly obvious but it's central to much of what we do. And there's a paper published last year by Michael Bem who actually attributesAustralia'sNational Strategy and its involvement - its focus on safety and design as changing the US in their approach to health and safety because he says he could get no interest whatsoever in safety and design in the US until we became so open about its importance at a sort of a government level.
Now, Michael last year published a paper in which he looked at – what was it? It wassomething like 250investigations of incidents across about seven organisations and what he found was that if we were to go and look at the administrative and personal protection area down at this end, then the recommendations of 80% - 80% of the investigations - had focused on that as where to control. Of these 250 or, I think it was 247 from memory, but anyway - of these incidents, there were only 20% where the focus was up here. Now, that's a challenge for us I think, a real challenge as we go forward. And that technical emphasis or focus has been followed by a focus, I think given quite a push forward,through the 1950s after -the Second World War and the involvement of a lot of engineers getting involved in engineering problems out of the workplace and doing the right thing in that sense.
I think the engineers started to focus on the human factor and I think they started to see people as a problem and you've got to engineer around those people. I mean it's a good concept in one sense I think, and it reflects what Thomas Legg had been saying about taking the control away from the individual. But I think there's also a bit of a problem. I mean, I ran a department at one time at a school of engineers and I remember the joke at the time was, "How doyou detect a people centred sort of engineer?" and the answer was, "Well, he's the engineer that looks at your feet rather than his own feet when you say 'hello' to him." Now there's a tendency for engineers to be quite sort of compliance minded and focused on the engineering. I, at one stage, tried to change the nature of engineering and then we found research that really showed that many engineers have chosen to be engineers at very, very early ages. So in fact, you can't really do it - change the nature of engineering after they've joined engineering becauseyou've already got a self-selected population.
But anyway, in this period of human factors research, it's all about error. How do you stop error? Wonderful work being done. Wonderful work being done by people like James Reason with a model – the Swiss cheese model in which you have defences in depth and layers of defences and you try to make sure that the little holes in the Swiss cheese don't all line up and such, that there's a sort of accident trajectory that runs through all those defences. It also deals with the challenges of the sort of, not just direct pathways of causation, but also latent pathways where perhaps the failure to do something on behalf of somewhere in the system means that the defences are not there whenyou want them. So lots of really important work done there.
And I remember one experiment which really is quite thought-provoking that was done by the Psychology Department at Harvard University. And it's actually – it's really important to the point where we, sometimes at Brookfield Multiplex, use it with new groups of young cadets to give them a sense of how they should not rely on human beings being able to recognise the growth of circumstances and problems. Many of you will have,I'm sure, seen this before but the experiment is something which, for instance, we would have a group of say, the one I can remember would be a group of 28 new cadets.
They've come fresh to your industry. They're really keen to be successful. You're briefing them the first time. They're going to be working with senior managers and getting to know the business, and working with each other, and they're really, really trying to impress one another.And you play them a video produced by Harvard which is two groups of three people - one dressed in white, one dressed in black and each team has a ball and they’re passing the ball between their respective team members and bouncing it on the floor. And you give the people a difficult challenge and that is that you want them to count the number of air passes and floor passes - bounces - that occur whilst the video is playing, and these two teams are just sort ofpassing this ball around a net, a basketball net behind them.
And at the end of the little experiment you ask them, "How many air passes?", "How many bounce passes?" Some of them get it right, phenomenally accurately, but then you see a bit of unease in the group because - the example that I see in my memory is - out of the 28, there were only, I think it was two, that were showing unease, and with great temerity, one puts the hand up and says "What? It – but, but the gorilla?" and the othersort of 26 turn around saying "What gorilla?" and in the midst of this video, it turns out there's a woman in a gorilla suit has walked in front of the camera and is waving her arms like this. You cannot believe that people could have missed it. And that – in actual fact,I remember this particular circumstance because we had another course of entries about a year later. We redid it but I couldn't make it to the first day of the program. So we did it on the last day of the program. They now all knew each other. They all were comfortable being in the presence of senior managers and each other, and probably, given it was a Friday morning,they'd hadsome drinks the Thursday night. So they were very, very comfortable and about half of them saw the gorilla.
So, it's a good way of getting across to young people that some of your best and most focused workers might be the ones that are going to miss things, and that video has been - was used in part of BHP by one of my master students, increasing the near miss reporting because you changed a near miss from being something that silly people are involved with, to a 'gorilla moment' and that language was used within the site, "I've had a gorilla moment," and the reporting went up. So, psychology has a lot to offer us.
But around probably the 1980s as was mentioned in the introduction, I probably have to own up to having been involved in helping to set up theAustralian standard on management systems. To many senses, I think it has helped us to go into a little bit of a side branch and move a bit slowly with a great focus on paperwork and bureaucracy. It doesn't have to be that way, but I think it has probably been a bit that way. So, it was meant to be all focused on continuous improvement. It was the era of improving productivity and quality. Anyone that was alive then like I was, you probably had been to events where you felt you were ina Billy Grahamsort of revivalist movement,and you were goingto be asked to come up to the front and affirm your belief in quality at any moment.