Accelerating Safety Requires Evidence, Not Assumptions
This article is part of the Accelerating Safety spotlight series, profiling Australian WHS leaders who changed how the profession thinks and works.
In 1980, Australia's workplaces were changing — but not always in ways that kept pace with what was being discussed in parliament or reported in the press. At BHP's Port Kembla steelworks, one of the country's most significant industrial sites, the workforce was large, the work was hard, and the rules about who could do which jobs were firmly in place.
Among those rules were weight-barring provisions embedded in occupational health regulations. These placed limits on lifting requirements that effectively excluded women from a wide range of industrial roles. The regulations were framed as health protections. On paper, that looked straightforward.
What Robynne Murphy (pictured above) and Lou-Anne Barker asked (and what OHS officer Chloe Mason was eventually asked to investigate) was whether the safety justification actually held up.
The investigation
Murphy and Barker's campaign in 1980 and 1981 was a direct challenge to the evidence base behind the exclusions. The question wasn't philosophical — it was practical: did the physical demands of these specific jobs actually justify the restrictions in place?
This was not a comfortable question to raise in 1980. Heavy industry had its established ways of working, and the safety regulations carried the weight of official authority. Challenging them meant being prepared to go through the process of actually testing the claims.
Chloe Mason did exactly that. As an OHS officer, she had both the access and the professional obligation to examine the work properly. She looked at what the jobs involved, what the physical demands genuinely required, and whether the regulatory restrictions were proportionate to the actual risk.
Her conclusion: the safety justifications were not adequately supported by the nature of the work. The restrictions had been built on assumptions rather than on rigorous occupational analysis.
Why it mattered for the profession
The Port Kembla case arrived at a moment when Australian WHS was beginning to professionalise in earnest. The idea that safety was a technical discipline — requiring evidence, analysis, and proportionate responses to demonstrated risk — was taking hold.
What Mason's investigation demonstrated was something the profession has continued to build on: safety frameworks are only as good as the evidence behind them. A regulation that looks protective on paper but isn't grounded in genuine risk assessment isn't doing its job.
That principle (that safety claims require scrutiny, and that professional rigour means testing assumptions rather than accepting them) is now central to how Australian WHS operates. Cases like Port Kembla were part of how it got there.
The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and related equal opportunity legislation created formal mechanisms for challenging restrictions that lacked proportionate justification. The development of more evidence-based approaches to occupational health assessment owes something to the work done in cases like this one.
Why it matters in 2026
The 2026 AIHS National Health & Safety Conference takes as its theme Accelerating Safety — a question about how the profession moves faster toward genuine protection for every worker in every environment.
Part of that answer lies in the quality of evidence behind our frameworks. In 2026, WHS professionals are still doing the work Mason did in 1981: testing whether the controls in place are proportionate to the actual risks, challenging assumptions that haven't been rigorously examined, and ensuring that safety decisions are based on what the evidence actually shows.
Murphy, Barker and Mason helped establish that standard, and the profession is still building on it today.
