It is not uncommon for countries to have tickets on themselves.
While a General Electric survey found that 18 per cent of home-grown business leaders considered Australia to be an “innovation champion”, only 2 per cent of 2,800 international senior executives matched this confidence. The United States led the overall tally for recognition with 65 per cent, while Japan had 45 per cent but only 26 per cent from Japanese.
According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, the GE Global Innovation Barometer ranked Australia 16th out of 30 innovation countries. It rated well for university-industry collaboration and research and development, though perhaps we should not get too excited about the flow-on effect as only 28 per cent of Australian “executives” included R&D in their definition of innovation (globally 41 per cent were more generous about research).
The IT industry is one of those newer industries, like finance, that has adopted innovative and flexible work practices including telecommuting from home. The new Model Work Health and Safety Act January 1 2012, and being introduced variously by the states, has broadened the designers’ responsibilities to cover health and safety requirements in a huge variety of corporate and non-corporate workplaces for a huge variety of employers, including the “self”.
With the new laws, the primary duty of care will lie with the organisation to be known as a Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking or PCBU. The PCBU’s duties are associated with “the carrying out of work” in a workplace “where a worker goes, or is likely to be, while at work”.
You could not get much wider a definition than that. The Act places duties on PCBUs who carry out workplace activities associated with the design, manufacture, import or supply of structures (and plant or substances) and installation, construction or commissioning of structures. A worker is “a person who carries out work in any capacity for a person conducting a business or undertaking”.
“The terms PCBU and Worker have been adopted to reflect that employment relationships are no longer based solely on the traditional employer-employee model,” says John Darcy, OHS Manager of Master Builders Association of Victoria.
“ Broadening the scope to Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking ensures that the duty of care is now imposed on those who are materially involved in the design or materially affect the performance of work,” says Paul Breslin OHS&E Manager, Construction and /Development, Brookfield Multiplex.
For the first time in many jurisdictions the safety in design legislation will cover buildability, maintenance, modification and demolition, he says.
“Implementation of the new obligations will require designers to consider how a building/structure might be used and review who they need to give information to and what information they need to provide,” says Blake Dawson Partner, Marie-Claire Foley.
People working from home and considered a legal entity conducting a business or undertaking (and nut simply as an individual) will also have to assess risk factors, as a PCBU. Consulting engineer and ergonomist Mark Dohrmann, who gives expert advice in court cases on OH&S malpractice, warns of potential hazards, both internal and external. Slippery pathways and loose steps; carpets, poor seating and lighting (glare that is too blinding, for instance); worn power plugs; objects that are heavy to lift; stairs that you can fall down — it is enough to make you tread very lightly.
Designers and architects will have to be ever vigilant for their own safety as well as that of others within the new occupational health and safety obligations.
Image: Work Safe WA
Deborah Singerman is a Sydney-based journalist and editor, specialising in architecture and design, including city, community, society, economy, sustainability and culture.
