Central Safety Group Melbourne

Modernising and simplifying safety

If you are looking for ways to improve your safety presence and processes, Scott McMillan delivered some great advice and suggestions in his presentation.

It was information-packed and thoroughly engaging due to his rich experience in different workplaces and situations. He is currently Director of Safety at Melbourne Park, a site which contains six huge venues for elite sports, concerts and major entertainment events.  Before a career in safety, he worked as an electrician and instrumentation technician in a range of places, including Antarctica!

Supported by examples, videos and  illustrations, Scott’s talk offered some useful and fresh perspectives on how to approach and manage safety. Importantly, it also showed how to adopt emerging technologies when preparing safety information and training, making them more accessible. His first advice was to establish a strong safety brand in your workplace: the message is to make it all about the work and meet your audience where they are.

There were some good basic tips and ideas on safety communications, as well as the eye-opening statistic from studies that show around 44% of adult Australians are not operationally literate. Therefore, it is crucial to present material that people both want to, and are able to, read.  There was also some fantastic advice on how to make board papers pack a bigger punch.

Scott emphasised the importance of decluttering safety, to prioritise and distil what can amount to many dozens of safety procedures, hundreds of pages and countless thousands of words, often written in language and references that are a challenge to follow. 

Some take-home messages from Scott's impressive presentation were: make your system easy to use, not easy to audit; fix the work, and safety will happen; chase safety in isolation and you will get paperwork, not results.

As a complement to Scott's talk, financial members may like to re-visit the presentation by John Ansley from Knowby in October last year: AI know-how and OHS (log in first).

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Site visit to Melbourne & Olympic Parks

On a windy, wet Tuesday in July, intrepid members of Central Safety Group attended a site visit to Melbourne & Olympic Parks –it was just like being at Wimbledon!

Fortunately for the group, hosts Scott and Glen had special security clearance to use the below ground corridors.  It provided protection from the rain as well as the opportunity to view operations unavailable to the average person. Recent improvements have included the completion of these large corridors underneath the venues, enabling cars and trucks to move around without encountering members of the public.

The group was also fascinated to learn how they manage the risk of multiple teams and contractors dismantling huge sets and stages in short periods of time, including the use of movable stages and overhead tracking. The collaborative work that has to done between the site teams and contractor teams is enormous. While the group was there, workers were in the process of removing the ice rink from Disney on Ice.

Due to the weather and size of the precinct (a total of 44 hectares), members could not visit all the venues, but there may be an opportunity to return in the future.

A huge thanks to our hosts Scott McMillan, Director of Safety, and Glen King, Operations Manager, for sharing their knowledge and providing an excellent tour for our members.

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