Safety Management Systems and their audits have been a topic of discussion in Australia for some years, and their development has spawned a large and lucrative selfsustaining market. Whilst the quality of some systems is highly suspect, and many have unsound concepts, some have proved useful, despite their qualities, and probably based on the notion that something is better than nothing. This paper reviews one such government-sponsored system, Safety MAP, in a non-academic, Australian-style, way.
Safety MAP had its origins in the Garden of Eden, through a state government department then known as the Health and Safety Organisation of Victoria. Victoria, a State of Australia, is commonly known as the "garden state.' Like all ancient gardens, this state government instrumentality has changed name on several occasions, so that its exact location at the time of the genesis is now a matter of conjecture, surrounded by mythology, and poorly documented.
One can imagine a group of enthusiastic OH&S regulatory genii discussing the appalling lack of good management systems, the need to be able to audit those systems, and their ability to tell industry what it needed. After all, any system generated by the law enforcement agency, and promoted with the resources of government, was bound to succeed.
Thus, Safety MAP version 1 was created, and came into the world, full of hope and aspirations.
Now, in this garden at Eden (also known as Melbourne), there was a serpent called "the commercial OH&S consultancy market." The commercial arm of OH&S consultancy was very unhappy about the government promoting its own baby, and, horror of horrors, giving it away free of charge! The commercial arm gathered itself together to do battle, and took its case to the Maker Of Policy ("the Maker" now renamed by Government decree "The Victorian Workcover Authority"), pointing out the disastrous consequences of such a move, and the essential unfairness of it all. The Authority responded by pointing out that it was not really a safety management system as such. It just looked like it, and it was being used as one by the unintelligent business community. It was really an audit tool, designed for people to find out how good their own safety management system was, and give them guidance on what a system should look like, just in case they didn't have one (!).
But the Authority had originally intended that this system be created to audit those in industry who had the audacity to self insure for worker's compensation, even though there was a perfectly good government based single insurer scheme called "Workcare". So, SafetyMAP was actually the audit tool to be used to ensure that the self insurers were doing the right thing, and it could be imposed without dissent on that population, as they had to bow to the wishes of the licence-giving regulator The Victorian Workcover Authority. Thus, it had a market presence all to itself, regardless of what the commercial consultancy market or anyone else had to say about it.
