On 28 May 2020 Western Australia’s Minister for Industrial Relations, Hon. Bill Johnston MLA and the Regional Development Minister, Hon. Alannah MacTiernan MLC, made the following statements following a Farm Safety Summit called to address the 28 work related deaths in the agricultural industry over the previous 10 years:
“At the Summit, we agreed that to improve workplace safety requires a cultural change and I understand this will be difficult to do, but it is achievable. Our ambition for Agriculture, is zero harm and zero deaths for workers. The next step is to continue discussions with these groups and to meetup again in the next year to see what initiatives the State Government can develop,” said Industrial Relations Minister Johnston.
“It was clear from the Summit that industry wants to improve its record, and we are committed to working closely with the farming sector to identify areas of risk and the best strategies to address these,” Regional Development Minister MacTiernan commented.
Turns out, neither Minister has made the effort to progress any new initiatives or strategies, instead they sat back and watched and waited for the draconian new industrial manslaughter laws to prevent farm accidents.
But, after 14 deaths in the last 18 months, far more than any other state, serious questions need to be asked about why they have put all their faith in the impact of harsh new penalties when it’s clearly not working.
Predictably, when a government strategy has failed, the buck passing starts; the Minister responsible is nowhere to be seen, the Minister for Agriculture is off talking about how yet another inquiry will help transform the industry (The Countryman 18 Aug 2022), as usual leaving the Department to wear the bad news, with respected WorkSafe Commissioner Darren Kavanagh being the face in the media.
By any KPI, both these Ministers have failed miserably when it comes to farm safety, after all their talk about how the state needed to adopt harsh new industrial safety laws to prevent work related accidents and deaths.
Despite being told repeatedly by industry that the new laws went too far and were not fit for purpose for the agricultural sector, the government and sections of the opposition refused to listen.
Back in May 2020, I wrote to the government pointing this out (‘Farm Safety Needs a Well Funded Safety Campaign’, Farm Weekly) but all industry got back was an announcement of additional funding for more inspectors.
If only it were that simple: bigger penalties + more inspectors = lower incidents. The government now has a problem which, if they have an open mind, I will help them address. The alternative is that the deaths will keep coming, something they have to be held, in part, responsible for.
So, in this opinion piece I am going to attempt to do five things.
Firstly, highlight the difficulty of looking for answers in the available statistics. Secondly, warn the government not to treat the industry as a single entity. Thirdly, delve into the theory of deterrence to help the government understand where it has gone wrong. Fourth, point out what works and why and fifth, detail step by step what needs to be done.
Let’s start with some numbers. Since 2001, 1651 people have died on Australian farms; that’s over three times Australia’s casualties in Vietnam or 40 times the deaths over a similar period of the Afghanistan Iraq conflicts.
For a headline you could say that Australian farms are more dangerous than serving in all of our wars in the last 60 years. But is that a fair comparison? Anyone can twist a statistic to get a headline or build a case.
Let’s have another go. Across Western Australia in the 10 years before the commencement of the debate around the industrial manslaughter laws, 41 people died in farm accidents. However 14 of those have been during the height of the debate around the new laws, so does that mean the new laws are responsible for the recent spike, or is it Covid or carbon farming or two big profitable years?
Trying to understand correlation and causation is an important part of getting to the bottom of the problem, which is why the WorkSafe Commissioner has instigated the current inquiry due to report at the end of the year.
Unfortunately, I suspect it will be well beyond the capable skills of the Independent Inquirer, Pam Scott, noting the limited time and resources available.
Let’s face it, attempting to understand the drivers behind accidents on farms across the developed world occupies the minds of a large number of international experts.
They are busy dissecting the fact that farmers do 1000 different risky jobs over the year, whereas a miner or builder tends to do the same thing day in and day out.
The end result is hundreds of published reports and inquiries including by specialist institutions within Australia such as the University of Sydney’s AgHealth Australia, Farm Safe Australia and the Rural Safety and Health Alliance.
They can tell us that, nationally, over the past 20 years, tractors are responsible for 18 per cent of deaths, quad bikes 16 per cent, children are victims in 14 per cent and workers vs employers are split almost evenly 50:50.
What they can’t do is break the numbers down into far more useful data that separates out the size and turnover of the farm, education and experience of the victim and managers, age and condition of equipment involved, intensive, broadacre, horticulture/viticulture, ownership structure, location, financial stress, seasonal stress, fatigue, ground condition etc.
Without all this we can’t really understand what went wrong and who if anyone is to blame. Just as without clear definitions on commercial vs hobby, big vs small, we can’t identify safe sectors vs risky sectors.
What would the stats look like if you take out the quad, motor, aircraft, horse accidents on small hobby farms along with weekend and after hour accidents? Where do the larger broadacre grain farms sit vs cattle, dairy or pastoral, hay vs grain?
This information is simply not available. As a result, I doubt the report commissioned by WorkSafe into the WA deaths over the past 5 years is going to reveal anything ground-breaking or statistically rigorous enough upon which to base major conclusions.
In fact, there is a real risk the government will hide behind any recommendations and roll out more useless talk of collaboration and transformation hoping no one will remember that they promised back in 2020 to work with industry on new initiatives.
Neither should the government be given the opportunity to hide behind its past announcements of more inspectors as they too have failed to prevent the spike in deaths.
Deterrence: the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences
We see the concept of deterrence in action at each election when opposing political parties conduct a law and order auction in an attempt to outbid each other by promising to dramatically increase penalties rather than do the hard yards of addressing the root cause of crime.
Unfortunately, the fact our prisons are full should indicate harsher penalties don’t translate into less crime.
Alternatively, there is lots of evidence that if you engage early and often through community services with high-risk families, then you have a real chance of steering the next generation away from a life of crime.
The same principle applies to farm safety – you can attempt to motivate people by fear of harsh penalties or you can work with the industry and motivate them to change by engaging early and often.
In the simple world of our more simple policy makers, they think that simple top down solutions are all you need to solve complex problems.
Build renewables and the price of power drops. Ban live exports and farmers switch to fat lambs. Put a price on carbon and farmers switch to carbon farming. Threaten 20-year prison terms and industrial deaths end.
How you get people to change their approach to risk when they choose to work in a high risk environment is a complex matter that requires more than the government threatening them.
If the government wants farmers to change the way they operate they will need to do the hard yards and learn from other departments and jurisdictions what works and what doesn’t.
For example, we know deterrence theory tells us massive penalties don’t work, just as the theory informs us that if people perceive it likely that they will be caught for an offence and receive harsh and swiftly-delivered punishment upon conviction, then they will be less likely to offend.
Makes sense. Knowing you will quickly face the firing squad for failing to obey the order to go over the top is usually enough to get soldiers to take their chances and climb out of the trench and run towards a machine gun.
But it’s probably a step too far to take the same approach and send employers to the gallows if they have a fatal work-related accident in their workplace. Mind you, listening to the debate on industrial manslaughter it would seem some of those union officials who pushed for the legislation would have endorsed such a penalty.
Facing a potential $10m fine and or 20 years in prison following a three year court case does not quite hit the same psychological spot, which is probably why it has not generated the outcomes in the farming sector that the government was hoping for.
Where deterrence theory does work is via the small carrot and stick, spot penalties linked to a high level of compliance enforcement, which is effective in driving a changed behaviour. Think about the effectiveness of booze buses reinforced by regular ads on TV warning us not to drink and drive.
We don’t like it, but it works.
It’s for that reason the police don’t run booze bus blitzes once every few years, just as the water safety, alcohol abuse and stop smoking government campaigns are not run intermittently.
When the government feels it has to step in and run a community safety campaign they invest in a long-term strategy, with communication at the heart of it.
WorkSafe on the other hand are given funding for inspectors and then left without the follow up resources to undertake long complex engagement strategies that personally touch every farmer regularly, but which leave the big stick at the front gate.
For example, the Road Safety Commission has a budget allocation from the fines generated by traffic infringements to support their community engagement program. Why isn’t WorkSafe offered something similar?
Use the funds from infringements to fund education and engagement campaigns, rather than prosecutions.
There is another part of deterrence theory that the government seems not to understand and that is social sanctions, where potential offenders are deterred by the anticipation of informal community judgment, rather than the formal punishment prescribed by legislatures.
The evidence for this can be found in a research study by the Institute for Work and Health in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. In this article they examined 43 peer reviewed studies and, while the results might not be something farmers want to hear, it is certainly something a government interested in reducing farm accidents should be all over.
The evidence is that regular inspections with small penalties, linked to ongoing public campaigns and published examples is an effective driver of cultural change. People respond to peer pressure and will do the right thing.
But this will require more money from Treasury for WorkSafe, something that is not coming. Looking at the budget papers, funding allocation for Safety Advice and Regulation is set to track down from $91m this year to $88m next year, $86m in 2024-25 and to $84m in 2025-26. This will no doubt incentivise WorkSafe to top up their budget by going after higher penalties ($52m income last year) which Treasury then uses to offset the department’s costs.
A portion of fines and penalties should be quarantined to address complex high-risk industries like agriculture and help them improve their outcomes.
If the Ministers who publicly announced they were working with the industry two years ago are the slightest bit interested in doing more to reduce incidents on farm, let me suggest a 10-point plan.
1: Read the report commissioned by the COSH Agricultural Safety Working Group undertaken by Peter Cooke (Acknowledge) and presented earlier this year. This clearly maps out a strategy and just needs to be funded.
2: Read the report being prepared by the independent inquirer.
3: Establish a Farm Safety Council similar to the Road Safety Council, with industrial psychologists, ag consultants, farm safety experts, farm safety system providers, rural communication consultants, plus WorkSafe and Safe Farms WA and set them the target of zero farm deaths by 2030.
4: Contract Rural West which does Rural Financial Counselling to do farm safety audits and engagement with high risk farms who have financial challenges.
5: Establish a rural specialist team within WorkSafe to work with industry including a communications team to develop material for the rural press including case studies and incident reports plus regular TV and radio communication.
6: Sort out the statistics by pulling out the hobby farms and separating sectors to build a better data base.
7: Sort out the quad bikes that still have no roll over bars.
8: Properly fund SafeFarm WA so they can provide every farm with a simple cloud-based farm safety system at no cost, then there is no excuse for not having access to a safety system.
9: Make Muresk the centre of farm safety training. It has the facilities and the location to become the focal point of farm safety for the state.
10: Fix WorkSafe’s budget. A properly funded department will have more time to engage and will be less focused on using the big stick to rack up court wins to keep Treasury happy.
At around $2m a year over 8 years such an approach is the game changer needed. If Victoria can find $20m over 4 years for farm safety WA can find $16m over 8.
Final point, it’s now been two years since the responsible Ministers said they would do something, just as it is two years since I wrote to them telling them to do something. After 14 deaths it’s now time to do something more than develop initiatives and strategies.
All Farms need a written safety policy and plan, all staff need inductions, all farmers need to do training and tickets. WorkSafe can inspect anytime. Dave Gossage from PrePlan offers pre harvest on farm safety audits and inductions 0457323814, Competent Solutions – Safety Training and piloting, telehandler etc tickets 0448050295, FarmSafe WA safety package and training 0402611290. DMIRS, AgHealth Australia, IAuditor Safety Culture free check lists.
