Harmonisation and More Paper

The idea of law harmonisation between the states is a good thing. In railways for example, the history broken rail gauge sizes across the colonies of Australia is a fascinating study of politics and proof of no common sense.  The inconsistencies of rail sizes was not much of a problem in 1850 when rail was limited to a few cities.  For those who had vision, they could see that by Federation of states there would be a massive problem, and there was.  By 1921 it became clear that the lack of standardisation of rail gauges in Australia was a costly problem. Several Royal Commissions were held into the problem but any no effort at standardisation was made till 1945, nearly 100 years after the crazy decisions and personal bias of a few colonial engineers.  When I was a kid we would travel by train between states and have to get off on the border to change to another train because the rail gauges between states weren’t uniform.  When rail gauge conversion started in the 1990s, its costs were astronomical.

Similar inter-state differences exist in many other areas.  For example, school education and lack of standardisation has also been a massive problem.  One state would have intake as 4 year olds, others as 5 year olds.  Some states had Primary school to Year 7, others to Year 6, with Year 7 in High School.  Similar problems exist in criminal codes and laws, rights and legalities.  Living in Canberra and going across the border to Queanbeyan has been used a few times to access things banned in the ACT.  Similarly people migrate here to access XXX porn and a range of other sexually oriented services.  What a headache all this was if you lived on the border in Albury!

The problem of standardisation also extends to inconsistencies in safety.  It’s interesting that the report into seeking harmonisation of safety in Agriculture is called Beyond Common Sense.  The drive for harmonisation of safety laws commenced in the 1990s with a National Improvement Framework and a National OHS Strategy endorsed in 2002.  Then in 2009 under the Rudd Government the safe Work Australia Act commenced the process of finally developing the harmonisation of OHS laws.

On January 2012 the Commonwealth and some states (5 out of 9 jurisdictions) rescind old OHS Acts and commence new Workplace Safety Acts.  This is a good idea but there are a few things to consider as a result of this, not least of which is the problem of flooding.  I have spoken of flooding before, and the problem of humans being able to manage and comprehend extensive volumes of information.  We know that when people are flooded, they default to micro-rules, heuristics and common sense.  Flooding empowers myth making and unreliable approaches to risk management.  The new WHS Act is significantly larger than the old Act, about 30% larger in volume.  The regulations which accompany the WHS Act extend to 600 pages.  This is without looking at codes of practice and standards.  Obviously, in need to compromise and harmonise, we have increased the resultant and associated paper work by 30%. 

Whatever we do with regulation, it must be manageable.  My concern is that it is becoming less manageable and more complex and that regulators are not conscious of the psychology of risk and all that it tells us about human judgement and decision making. 
I saw discussion the other day on the Internet where risk managers were arguing about the “science” of risk calculation.  It was all about wether it was this or that likelihood, frequency and consequence times severity.  I interjected in the debate and asked if human subjectivity plays any part in this “science” of risk calculation and was told by the moderator promptly to butt out. 
The expectation that the WHS harmonisation and risk assessment is all objective and manageable is a nonsense.