Western Australia’s largest workplace safety trade show, the WA Safety Show, will offer free OSH law workshops and thousands of practical safety solutions when it runs from Tuesday 24 to Thursday 26 August.
Held every two years, the show will host more than 150 safety and materials handling specialists offering everything from first aid supplies through to warehousing management systems.
New to the show will be workshops to help employers meet their obligations under new legislation due to take effect on January 1, 2012. Both the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA (CCIWA) and lawyer Maria Saraceni of Norton Rose will explain the sweeping changes to workplace safety under the new Act.
“As with the national Model Act, officers in WA will have a positive duty of care to exercise due diligence to ensure that their corporation complies with its statutory obligations. That’s the biggest change that harmonisation will bring in Western Australia,” Saraceni says.
“It’s a change of mindset – you’ll need to become pro-active about safety and be able to demonstrate what it is you have done in meeting your new obligations. The next 18 months until the new laws are implemented will be essential to allow you to adopt the new approach necessary to help you meet your obligations.”
The inaugural show in 2008 attracted 4000 visits, with the mining, building and construction, and manufacturing sectors dominating the visitor list. In the week leading up to the event, WA Safety Show organiser Marie Kinsella of Australian Exhibitions & Conferences said visitor pre-registrations suggested another very strong turnout.
“More people have pre-registered this year and the workplace safety law workshops are proving extremely popular,” Kinsella says.
“At the WA Safety Show, solutions to the tough safety challenges like vehicle safety, materials handling, occupational diseases and noise are all under one roof. The law says you need to stay up to date and this is a very efficient way of doing exactly that.”
The WA Safety Show and the concurrently-held WA Safety Conference presented by the Safety Institute of Australia in WA will run from August 24 to 26 at the Perth Convention Exhibition Centre.