I’m tired of the bull**** in safety.

After 17 years in safety, I want to share something personal, a realisation I had recently while preparing for a speaking gig.

I’ve been fortunate in my career. Actually, I’ve been incredibly lucky.

At 24, I landed an executive safety role in a $1 billion business. I had autonomy, a voice, and a team around me who genuinely cared and wanted to make a real difference. We wove safety into every aspect of our daily operations.

There were metrics. There were reports. But there was also collaboration, consultation, and genuine commitment. “Compliance theatre” wasn’t even in my vocabulary.

At 36, I decided to fly the nest and moved into a new organisation. How naïve I was.

Suddenly, I started to see safety through the eyes of others.

• Compliance.

• Bureaucracy.

• Meaningless bull****.

I found myself in the role of “safety police”. But here’s the thing; not all people need that level of oversight, certainly not operators with decades of experience. Nobody comes to work planning to hurt themselves. When WHS treats people like they’re a hazard unto themselves, we miss the point.

This operations team was incredible at what they did. They certainly didn’t need me telling them how to suck eggs. But the site they were working on was falling down around them. The problem wasn’t the people, it was the infrastructure. What this team needed was an advocate, someone to drive meaningful consultation and engagement, and hammer home what they needed to work safely up the corporate line. But for the first time, I found I couldn’t do this. Corporate messages came out daily, talking up the business’s safety record, while the reality on the ground was borderline diabolical. That was my first taste of compliance theatre in action.

So I left that gig and ended up in what, on paper, was my dream job. I had an amazing team, and together we were meant to be the engine room driving real changes in WHS systems, processes, and culture.

I thought this gig will give me a decade or more of deep satisfaction. I was wrong.

What did I find myself doing? Reporting. My team and I spent at least 80% of our more-than-full-time hours on safety reports, metrics, requested "Board Papers" which were not related to anything we saw as critical, and trying to untangle the mess of bureaucracy we found ourselves in.

So meaningless. So soul-destroying.

The thing is, it wasn’t driven by some evil corporate overlord. Everyone genuinely cared about people. There was real passion. The foundation was solid, but over many years, genuine safety progress had been confused with theatre. It was always about the next initiative, the next "focus area". The daily excellence of the operators was forgotten. He who had the shiniest and flashiest initiative was king. Safety was performance.

I was ready to quit safety. I very nearly did.

But here I am, 18 months later, running my own WHS business. Starting Safety Forward gave me a new perspective and reignited my passion for safety. Why? Because I could do it my way, without all the bull****.

I began working with smaller businesses, leaders without all the resources or the fluff. They need lean, effective safety solutions that fit into their daily operations. They want to make a real impact, not just fill out paperwork. Helping them reignited my passion for safety and helped me understand what I’d inadvertently done so well in my first 15 years.

I love working with the little guy. They have no interest in compliance theatre.

It’s not about numbers or reports. It’s about people. It’s about creating systems, processes, and environments where people can thrive.

Safety is not about the paper. Sure, there is paper and written procedures but the gold is in the process of building that paper, of actioning safety each and every day. When we think about safety as a piece of paper or an initiative, we miss the point. Safety is a verb. It’s an action that happens every day, even without WHS resources or interventions.

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