Occupational health and safety initiatives : an exploration of the National OHS Strategy in New South Wales' manufacturing industry

The introduction of the National OHS Strategy 2002-2012 into Australia signified a new direction in occupational health and safety (OHS) policy development. It represented the first policy in which Australia’s institutional stakeholders had reached a formal agreement to achieve targeted reductions in injuries and fatalities across Australian workplaces. However, despite its significance, the National OHS Strategy remains largely unexplored throughout the literature, as have national OHS strategies in other countries. This research seeks to contribute to narrowing this gap in knowledge by investigating the OHS policy process associated with the National OHS Strategy, with the intention of better understanding how OHS policies are developed, implemented, and evaluated. Applying a qualitative framework comprised of documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with government, trade unions, employer associations, and manufacturing businesses in New South Wales, this thesis explores one of the National OHS Strategy’s five objectives – improving the capacity of employers to manage OHS. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, which is grounded in institutional rational choice theory, provides the key theoretical framework in which the research findings are analysed. The IAD framework has allowed for policy evaluation that is different from the traditional and descriptive approach associated with examining policy through various stages of the policy cycle. Rather than describing stages, the IAD framework guides analysis on stakeholder interactions and behaviours, and highlights the influence of external factors and rules. The analysis of Australia’s National OHS Strategy is deepened through international comparisons with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Denmark, and Finland. The comparisons provide greater insight into the policy development, implementation, and evaluation possibilities that could have been undertaken for Australia’s 2002-2012 National OHS Strategy. As it is the intention of Australia to continue to develop and implement future strategies to improve OHS, the findings of this thesis help to identify the elements necessary for effective strategy making and implementation. In summary, the research highlights that the National OHS Strategy did not appear to have a significant impact in encouraging increased activity in improving employer capacity to manage OHS. The 2002 – 2012 Strategy’s shortcomings were uncovered in each aspect of the policy process. The main problems were, firstly, that stakeholders’ energy and attention was drawn away from the National OHS Strategy and into other areas of priority such as changing OHS legislation rather than implementing the Strategy. While stakeholders saw value in having the National OHS Strategy, it did not elicit sufficient motivation or commitment. Furthermore, a lack of clearly identifiable roles for each of the stakeholders resulted in responsibility for the Strategy being shifted to government, thereby diminishing the concept of the stakeholders ‘working together’. Knowledge and awareness of the National OHS Strategy diminished over the life of the Strategy; partly as a consequence of changes in personnel across the stakeholder groups, as well as a declining reference to the Strategy more broadly. The research also highlights the importance of resources to policy development. The National OHS Strategy was developed on weak foundations as the paring back of resources to Australia’s peak OHS body heightened jurisdictional responsibility for OHS, including implementation of the National OHS Strategy. The thesis’ contribution is multifaceted. It contains a history of the development of Australia’s first national policy for OHS, incorporating perspectives of employer associations, trade unions, and government relative to the Strategy’s objective of developing employer capacity. The thesis is particularly innovative in applying theory from the political science field to analyse the Strategy. Moreover, it utilises the IAD framework to evaluate the policy process relative to the National OHS Strategy’s goal of developing employer capacity. The application of a theoretical framework to analyse the National OHS Strategy brings rigour to the OHS discipline where there has generally been a dearth of theoretical policy evaluation of OHS policy. OHS has been an important area for public policy for decades. Through a thorough and theoretically informed evaluation of the National OHS Strategy’s impact on employer capacity to manage OHS, the thesis’ findings around institutional arrangements and the role of the actors provides guidance to improve policy development, implementation, and evaluation in future decades