"I didn't know" is no longer a defence: what regulator convergence means for psychosocial risk

"See your workplace the way a Regulator does, and how to act before harm happens" is the framing behind a recent practical design workshop from the Psychosocial Safety and Leadership Institute, led by Dr Caroline Howe. The line worth sitting with is this one: "'I didn't know' is no longer a defence. Whether you're under SafeWork NSW, WorkSafe Victoria, Comcare or another regulator, the principle has converged: if the work wasn't designed to be safe, the responsibility is yours." That convergence claim is worth checking against what each regulator has actually done this year. NSW's Code of Practice became enforceable 1 July. Victoria is funding new trials to redesign psychological health and safety measures. Comcare has an officer due-diligence duty under s.27 that applies as squarely to psychosocial hazards as physical ones. Different mechanisms, same underlying position: a business cannot rely on not having known about a risk once regulators expect risk assessment to be a standing discipline, not a reactive one. The workshop's core framing, "change the work, not the worker", is also a useful test for any existing psychosocial control. A control that asks workers to be more resilient, better at managing stress, or better at speaking up is a worker-facing control. A control that changes workload allocation, role clarity, rostering, or reporting lines is a work-design control. Regulators are consistently signalling that work-design controls are what they expect to see documented, because they're the ones that hold up as evidence of "reasonably practicable" steps. For officers and PCBUs still treating psychosocial risk as a training-and-awareness problem, this is the moment to check whether the current control set actually redesigns anything, or whether it just asks workers to cope better with a design that hasn't changed.