Keeping Safety on the Agenda When the Tide Turns
Pictured: Sharan Burrow. This article is part of the Accelerating Safety spotlight series, profiling Australian WHS leaders who changed how the profession thinks and works.
Institutional frameworks are easier to build than to keep. The Hawke government's 1983 Accord with the ACTU created the foundation for a national approach to workplace health and safety — most visibly through the National Occupational Health & Safety Commission (NOHSC), established the following year. For almost two decades after that, the assumption that OHS belonged in the central conversation between government, unions, and employers held reasonably steady.
By 2000, that consensus was under serious pressure. And the person who inherited the job of defending it, as President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was Sharan Burrow.
The political climate she walked into
Burrow was elected ACTU President in May 2000, becoming the second woman to lead the organisation after Jennie George (1996–2000). The Howard government, in power since 1996, had spent four years steadily reducing union influence in Australian workplaces through the Workplace Relations Act 1996, the 1998 waterfront dispute, and a sustained legislative program aimed at weakening collective bargaining.
The Accord-era assumption – that OHS was a matter for tripartite negotiation between government, employers, and unions – was no longer secure. Unions found themselves having to argue for a seat at a table they had previously taken for granted.
Burrow's response was not to retreat to wages and industrial campaigns and leave OHS to specialists. It was to keep insisting that workplace safety was inseparable from the broader question of what workers were owed at work.
WorkChoices and the safety dimension
The most direct test came in 2005, when the Howard government (having won control of the Senate at the 2004 election) introduced the WorkChoices legislation. The reforms went further than anything previously attempted: removing unfair dismissal protections for workers in businesses under 100 employees, narrowing award conditions, restricting union access to workplaces, and imposing significant penalties on union activity.
Among those penalties was one that bears directly on the WHS profession: unions could be fined $33,000 for providing OHS training to their members without employer agreement. In her public speeches during the period, Burrow repeatedly pointed to that specific provision as evidence of how far the regime had moved from any defensible standard. The right of workers to be trained in how to keep themselves safe at work had been recoded as an offence.
The ACTU's response was the "Your Rights at Work" campaign — a mobilisation that ran for more than two years across workplaces, communities, and media, and is widely credited with shaping the political environment that contributed to the Howard government's defeat at the 2007 federal election.
What that defeat made possible
The incoming Rudd government repealed WorkChoices and replaced it with the Fair Work Act 2009. But the change in political climate had a second consequence that matters more to the WHS profession specifically.
In 2008, the new government commissioned a National Review into Model Occupational Health and Safety Laws, chaired by Robin Stewart-Crompton — the same Robin Stewart-Crompton who had served as Chief Executive Officer of NOHSC two decades earlier. That review produced the recommendations that became the model Work Health and Safety Act, progressively adopted across Australian jurisdictions from 2011.
The harmonisation reforms were not a product of Burrow's presidency in any direct sense. But the political space in which they became possible — a federal government willing to invest in worker protection, a labour movement with restored standing in policy negotiations — was a product of the decade-long campaign she led.
The global chapter
After leaving the ACTU in 2010, Burrow became General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, a position she held until 2022 and the first woman to do so. Her ITUC work extended the same argument internationally: that supply chains, climate transitions, and global trade arrangements all carry safety implications, and that workers in the most exposed positions deserve the same baseline protections regardless of jurisdiction.
In 2026, she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia for her contributions to industrial relations, social justice, and climate action.
Why it matters in 2026
The AIHS National Health & Safety Conference 2026 theme — Accelerating Safety — is in part a technical question about data, systems, and risk models. But it is also a question about political and institutional conditions. Frameworks that took decades to build can be weakened in a single legislative term, as the WorkChoices period demonstrated.
Burrow's career is a useful reminder that maintaining a framework is not a less important job than building one. The model WHS Act would not exist without the 1983 Accord that created NOHSC. It also would not exist without the decade-long defence of worker protection that made the post-2007 reforms politically possible.
The next round of progress will depend on the same combination — institutional builders, and the people willing to defend what they build.
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The AIHS National Health & Safety Conference 2026 “Accelerating Safety” takes place this June in Adelaide. Find out more here.
