December 2021 (c) Building a preventative culture Work Health and Safety Australia’s Work Health and Safety (WHS) regime also provides an instructive model for the use of positive duties. Established in 2011, the model Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws comprise the Model WHS Act, the Model WHS Regulations and 24 Model Codes of Practice issued by SafeWork Australia. The Model WHS Act has been adopted in all jurisdictions except for Victoria and Western Australia. In the Respect@Work inquiry, the Commission considered this a useful example of building a preventative practice through positive duties and clear understanding of workplace responsibilities. The Australian WHS regime reflects the transformation in the approach to work health and safety law in Britain, after the report of the committee chaired by Lord Alfred Robens in 1972.56 The core of the WHS legislation that was introduced after the Robens report, ‘puts voluntary effort, or “self-regulation” by employers and workers at the heart of accident prevention’.57 It is a system that uses codes of practice, voluntary standards and non-statutory forms of guidance in preference to detailed, prescriptive regulation.58 The ‘Robens philosophy’ represented an ‘influential shift’ in safety and health regulation.59 The committee proposed ‘a wholesale redistribution of responsibility away from statutory regulation, to those who create the risks and those who work with them’.60 As set out in the Respect@Work report:61 The model WHS law framework has a three-tiered model based on the ‘Robens model’.62 This model recommends that duty holders be required to comply with: 1. General duties of care set out in a broad-based WHS statute. The Model WHS Act aims to provide a balanced and nationally consistent framework to secure the health and safety of workers and workplaces. 2. More detailed standards laid down in regulations. The Model WHS Regulations set out detailed requirements that must be applied to specific work activities and hazards in order to meet WHS duties. 3. Codes of practice, which form the third and final tier of the WHS regulatory architecture. The Model Codes of Practice provide practical information on how the requirements of the model WHS laws may be met.63 The Model WHS framework applies to all organisations, regardless of their size or industry. As it is ‘outcomes-based’, there is ‘flexibility for organisations to tailor their approach to safety to suit their circumstances’.64 68 FREE AND EQUAL An Australian Conversation on Human Rights