Bob Hawke & The National Compact
This article is part of the Accelerating Safety spotlight series, profiling Australian WHS leaders who changed how the profession thinks and works.
For most of Australia's industrial history, workplace health and safety was a state matter. Each jurisdiction had its own legislation, its own inspectorate, and its own approach. A worker injured in Queensland operated under different protections than a worker in Victoria. A manufacturer operating across multiple states faced a patchwork of obligations that were inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, and often inadequately enforced.
The argument for a national approach had been made, in various forms, for decades. It had not been acted upon. Changing that would require not just a policy argument but a political deal — and in 1983, when Bob Hawke led the Labor Party to government and struck an unprecedented agreement with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, that deal arrived.
The Accord and what it contained
The Prices and Incomes Accord (negotiated between the Hawke government and the ACTU under secretary Bill Kelty) was, on its surface, an agreement about wages. The unions would accept wage restraint; the government would expand what became known as the social wage: improvements to health, education, housing, and working conditions that workers would receive in place of pay rises they might otherwise have bargained for.
High on the ACTU's list of priorities, explicitly included in the Accord's terms, were changes to work health and safety laws. The union movement wanted OHS laws that were strong, comprehensive, and — critically — consistent across the country. The fragmented state-by-state system was not delivering that. Workers in high-risk industries moved between jurisdictions and encountered different standards. National industries faced regulatory complexity that added cost without adding protection.
The result was the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, established in October 1984 as an administrative body and formally proclaimed under the NOHSC Act in December 1985. For the first time, Australia had a dedicated federal institution whose purpose was to coordinate workplace health and safety policy across the country.
What NOHSC actually did
NOHSC was a tripartite body (structured to include representatives of government, employers, and unions) which reflected the Accord's philosophy that progress on working conditions required all parties to be inside the conversation. Its mandate was to develop national standards and codes of practice that states and territories could adopt, creating consistency without requiring a federal takeover of what remained constitutionally a state responsibility.
The early years were not without difficulty. The institution was, by the account of those close to it, initially top-heavy and slow to focus. A government review in 1987 led by B.V. McKay streamlined its operations and sharpened its direction. But the underlying achievement held: a national body existed. It had a mandate, a budget, and the political backing of a formal agreement between the federal government and the peak union body.
In the 1980s and 1990s NOHSC developed national standards across a wide range of hazards — hazardous chemicals, noise, occupational licensing, manual handling — that, where adopted by jurisdictions, brought Australian OHS practice closer to consistency than it had ever been.
The long shadow
NOHSC was eventually replaced by the Australian Safety and Compensation Council in 2005, which was itself succeeded by Safe Work Australia in 2009 — the body that now coordinates national WHS policy. The institutional lineage is direct. Each successor organisation built on what NOHSC had started: the proposition that workplace health and safety required national coordination, national standards, and a permanent federal institutional presence to achieve it.
Robin Stewart-Crompton, who later chaired the 2008 National Review that led to the model WHS Act, served as NOHSC's Chief Executive Officer — a thread that connects the Accord's original ambition to the harmonisation legislation that followed two decades later.
Why this matters in 2026
The model WHS Act that now provides a consistent framework across most Australian jurisdictions — the Act that defines what a 'person conducting a business or undertaking' must do, that sets the structure for psychosocial hazard management, that underpins the enforcement work of every WHS regulator in Australia — exists because someone, in 1983, insisted that OHS be part of a national political compact.
The Hawke-ACTU Accord was not primarily a safety document. But by placing OHS inside a formal agreement between government and the labour movement, it created the institutional foundation on which four decades of national WHS development has been built.
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The AIHS National Health & Safety Conference 2026 “Accelerating Safety” takes place this June in Adelaide. Find out more here.
