News

8 Aug 2016

WHS Guidelines Project: CX supports this!

Roderick Van Gelder is a professional event safety consultant. Several years ago he attempted to establish Event Safety Alliance Australia, an initiative to get an Australian version of the UK Purple Guide. But the industry is not keen on associating. Over in New Zealand they have ETNZ – while Australia has not managed to get things together.

“Well, I am not done yet”, he told CX. “I still believe that the Australian entertainment and events industry needs a set guidelines how to apply WHS requirements to public events.”

CX completely agrees.

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“Where the ESAA, and by the looks of it the LPA Safety Guide too, fell short is that it depended on people volunteering time to review and edit the guidelines, a big ask. So I am starting is a crowd funding campaign to raise the money to enable me to write the draft version as a starting point. And I am needing some help to get things started”, Roderick said.

“Basically, crowd funding needs to same as a tip jar in the pub or a hat for a busker, it needs some money in it to get it started. Nobody wants to be the first and seeing that others have already pledged gives it some level of confidence.”

The Live Performance Entertainment industry in Australia is employs almost 19,000 people full time and contributes substantially to the economy.

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Activities carried out by the various organisations cross every sector of manufacturing, construction, hospitality, logistics and of course entertainment.

As a result the number of WHS Acts, Regulations, Codes of Practice and Australian Standards that could apply to every production is astounding and very confusing for anyone who doesn’t deal with Work Health and Safety on a daily basis. What compounds the difficulty of finding answers is that rarely things are simple and straight forward and usually several different levels of information are required to find a solution to the problem or ‘best practice’ guidance.

Other than the now 15 years old Live Performance Australia “Safety Guidelines for Entertainment Industry” there are no safety guidelines for the entertainment industry. In 2012 the Event Safety Alliance Australia tried to bring people together to collectively write the Event Safety Guide for the entertainment industry by the entertainment industry but sadly failed to raise enough awareness, money and participation.

You can make a difference, go here: https://startsomegood.com/AESRG

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