Two federal CEOs are co-anchoring a webinar on what "safe work" actually requires from managers

Comcare has announced "Safe work is for life," a National Safe Work Month webinar on 1 October co-anchored by Comcare CEO Colin Radford and National Mental Health Commission CEO David McGrath. It is aimed at senior leaders, managers, WHS and HR practitioners, and health and safety representatives across the Commonwealth WHS jurisdiction, and it is the first time this cycle that two federal CEOs have appeared together specifically on a psychological safety framing. The webinar is built around four explicit questions: why safe and healthy work matters, how organisations create the conditions for people to actually access support, the relationship between work and mental health, and the role senior leaders, first line managers and HSRs play in shaping psychologically safe workplaces. Those are not abstract questions. They map directly onto what a regulator or a court asks for after something has already gone wrong, evidence that leadership set a direction, that managers were equipped to act on it, and that HSRs had a real, working channel into decisions. This sits alongside the Comcare national conference material this blog covered on 20 September, where "hidden harm" and early intervention were put on the record as enforcement priorities, and it follows a run of federal peak-body activity, including Safe Work Australia's own Safe Work Month opener and Mental Health Australia's Mental Health Month campaign, all converging on the same four-day window before October begins. The CEO pairing is the clearest signal yet that this is a coordinated federal push, not a single agency's messaging. For a PCBU, the practical value of the webinar's own framing is that it is a checklist in disguise. If a manager, an HSR or a senior leader were asked, after the fact, to show how their organisation created the conditions people needed to access support, what would the answer be, a policy that exists, or a named control, a named owner, and a record of when it was last reviewed and by whom. The webinar is free to attend and worth putting in front of anyone in that manager or HSR chain. But the questions it raises are ones worth answering in writing before 1 October, not during the session.