When the agency responsible for safety becomes a hazard in its own right
For ten years, the NSW Government has said in one way or another the future of workplace safety is prevention, not compensation. But the agency responsible for that prevention — SafeWork NSW is still running its entire enforcement and hazard-tracking system on technology built more than 20 years ago.
According to the 2024 NSW Audit Office:
“SafeWork NSW has over 20 years of case data in its core system, which is now at end-of-life… The system cannot reliably extract or analyse information to support risk-based regulation.”(Audit Office of NSW, 27 Feb 2024)
In other words:
The regulator can’t see the risks it’s supposed to prevent. And the government is calling that “modernisation.”
When the regulator is the hazard
Under NSW Work Health and Safety law, a psychosocial hazard includes anything in the design or management of work that increases the risk of psychological harm.
That doesn’t only apply to hospitals, mines, or schools. It applies to systems of regulation too.
When a 20-year-old case system:
can’t detect emerging hazards in time
can’t track dangerous workplaces with accuracy
can’t analyse high-risk industries or repeat offenders
produces data so unreliable the regulator can’t trust its own reports
…it becomes a hazard multiplier for every worker in the state.
If any employer left a critical safety system unmaintained for two decades, SafeWork NSW would issue a notice or prosecute.
But when SafeWork does it?
They call it a “business case in development.”
🔻 What the Audit Office found
System Failure | Real-World Impact |
No central data custodian | No guarantee data is accurate, complete, or consistent |
System “approaching end-of-life” | No ability to run predictive or real-time prevention models |
Can’t search cases for hazard keywords | Delayed response to manufactured-stone silica crisis |
Disconnected IT + siloed tools | Fragmented oversight — no single picture of harm |
Funding for replacement not secured | No confirmed timeline for upgrade or tender |
This is not just an IT problem. It is a regulatory failure.
The prevention story collapses here
For a decade, governments have said:
“We are moving from compensation to prevention.”
But you cannot prevent what you cannot detect.
You cannot reform what you cannot measure.
You cannot claim “the system is improving” when the system cannot quantify outcomes, track harm, or even run a reliable search query.
And you certainly cannot raise psychological-injury thresholds in workers' compensation to 31 % while the Safety regulator’s own systems still operate on pre-smartphone infrastructure.
🟥 Fix the foundations — stop the spin
The problem isn’t just money. It is governance.
NSW broke up WorkCover into three agencies in 2015: icare, SIRA, and SafeWork — without a unified data backbone. Or, adequate understanding of how each agency intersects with it's own customers' journey.
Now we have:
3 agencies
3 tech stacks
no shared recovery baseline
no verified prevention outcomes
and “reform” announcements built on dashboards, not evidence
If the community is being asked to believe in prevention, the State must first prove it can see and measure harm in real time.
That starts with:
full IT replacement with public timeline
independent data governance
outcome reporting, not activity reporting
transparency on where every prevention dollar goes
no more safety campaigns built on broken systems
Until then, every slogan about prevention is a distraction. Because the system built to protect people has not been rebuilt just rebranded.
Involve Your Community, Don't Keep Hiding it
A safety system running on end-of-life infrastructure doesn’t just fail workers — it endangers them. Before NSW raises thresholds, rebrands prevention, or blames psychological injuries on “cost pressures,” it must fix the foundations it neglected.
Not another inquiry. Not another brochure. A working system, with working data in a state that claims to care about working people.
And whoever is tasked with fixing this mess had better understand artificial intelligence, because automation has been shaping workers’ lives in this system for more than 30 years —from Colossus in the 1980s to algorithmic triage today and most of the people in charge still don’t even realise it’s there.
You can’t govern what you don’t understand. And in this system, the harm began long before anyone called it “AI.”
It is gravely inadequate for a safety regulator to have operated on 20-year-old IT infrastructure while claiming to lead a modern, prevention-based approach to workplace safety.
A regulator cannot prevent what it cannot see, analyse, or track — and failure to invest in modern systems is not a budget decision, it is a risk decision.
You cannot enforce 2025 safety standards with 2005 technology.
Sources (publicly available)
NSW Audit Office, Effectiveness of SafeWork NSW in Exercising its Compliance Functions, Feb 2024
ITNews, “SafeWork NSW’s 20-year-old IT system constrains data-based decisions,” Feb 2024
NSW Budget Estimates, Oct 2024 – SafeWork confirms system is 20+ years old, replacement “subject to business case”
WHS Regulation 2017, Part 3.1 — definition of psychosocial hazard
(No allegation of unlawful conduct is made. All evidence cited is on public record.)
