No abstract

The time has come—in fact, is overdue—to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of the style of occupational health and safety legislation being adopted in Australia. The Robens-style legislation, rather than individual pieces of legislation, is examined in context in all those states and territories that have adopted it, or moved to do so. This is important not only because no one Act is unique, but also because all these Acts and their implications cannot be properly understood or evaluated without seeing them as part of a process at work, both here and in Britain, of attempting to use legislation to prevent or limit occupational injury and disease.

T here have been recognisable stages of discourse in the area of occupational health and safety law over the past 30 years. They have been progressive and developmental, though at times some of us may have felt that true progression lagged behind a lemming-like process of 'catching up'. We started with the debate as to the value of moving from the specification-standard style of regulation. There was little argument that the specification-standard legislation of that time was in need of reform. And there was little voiced antagonism to the move to at least the hybrid of specification-plusperformance standard. However, the move was not entirely without criticism, and I acknowledge freely that I was one of the critics.In the years between the early 70s and early 90s, all Australian jurisdictions embraced the hybrid model. In the following years-or starting even earlier, but reaching force in the 90s-there was a change in concentration, from legislative forms to management strategies for compliance. How could management best achieve the required performance standard of reasonable care? Attention shifted from legislative requirements to compliance strategies, and the new catchword was 'risk management'. This is not something I would quibble with. It was, in fact, the aim of the initial changes, nowhere better set out than in the seminal Robens Report 1 -to encourage a pro-active approach to the problems of occupational health and safety. So in the early 90s, attention turned from legislative requirements and legislative style, to manner of compliance, risk management and best practice.Additionally, the work of a number of more empirical researchers started to focus on the regulatory agencies, and their practices. The work of Braithwaite and his various co-authors was notable here, with the concept of the 'enforcement pyramid', and of 'responsive regulation'. As a broad generalisation, I would assess that this work, though highly praised, did not have the results desired by its authors-or not in total. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in New South Wales at least, enforcement strategies have recently concentrated at the 'pointy' part of the pyramid. Analysing the reasons for that would be lengthy. There are al1 sorts of problems of analysis in this area. One is that solid statistical data takes years to amass, so that it is in a sense out of date by the time it is disseminated. Another is that so much depends on politics, and bureaucratic cultures, which are very difficult to analyse quantitively. And there are others also.However, since those early-90s years, there has developed a new style and focus for legislation. I am referring to what is sometimes called 'systems-standard regulation'. 2 The essence of systems-standard regulation is that the legislation outlines, in whatever degree of detail, the systems of risk identification, assessment and monitoring which employers should institute and pursue. A number of jurisdictions within Australia have introduced systems-standard elements into their occupational health a...

May 17, 1973 Industrial Relations — Unfair dismissal — Employee's notice to terminate employment accepted — Subsequent unfair dismissal during period of notice — Whether employee could unilaterally withdraw notice.

Abstract. This application demonstrates how to provide personalized, syndicated views on distributed web data using Semantic Web technologies. The application comprises four steps: The information gathering step, in which information from distributed, heterogenous sources is extracted and enriched with machine-readable semantics, the operation step for timely and up-to-date extractions, the reasoning step in which rules reason about the created semantic descriptions and additional knowledge-bases like ontologies and user profile information, and the user interface creation step in which the RDF-descriptions resulting from the reasoning step are interpreted and translated into an appropriate, personalized user interface. We have developed this application for solving the following real-world problem: We provide personalized, syndicated views on the publications of a large European research project with more than twenty geographically distributed partners and embed this information with contextual information on the project, its working groups, information about the authors, related publications, etc.