Over the Christmas and New Year break, I found myself deeply unsettled by two very different safety situations. One involved a high‑profile ASX‑listed enterprise. The other involved a much smaller, fast‑growing business in the building sector. The common thread was not size, funding, or sophistication. It was a failure of safety governance. In one case, there were repeated near misses and known risks. In the other, there was a fatality.
Neither scenario has left me.
What disturbs me most is not that safety incidents occur. Accidents, by definition, cannot always be eliminated. What keeps me awake at night is when risks are known, raised repeatedly, acknowledged, documented, and yet tolerated. When workarounds replace solutions. When the cost of fixing the problem is deemed too high, but the human cost is quietly discounted.
This is not an operational issue. This is a board issue.
When everyone knows, but nothing changes
In the ASX example, the safety issue is well known internally. Employees have raised it multiple times. Safety inspectors have acknowledged it as serious. Temporary mitigations have been engineered. None addresses the underlying problem.
The issue is fundamentally one of site suitability. A car dealership operating out of a facility that is simply not fit for purpose, adjacent to a high‑traffic dealership with thousands of vehicle movements. Congested access points. Heavy vehicles. Tow trucks. Rubbish trucks. No safe flow in or out. Employees are under constant stress, watching vehicles instead of doing their jobs. Near misses and physical accidents are becoming normalised.
Everyone knows the answer. The site is wrong. Fixing it would require a major capital decision, potentially tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So the organisation does not act. Instead, risk is pushed downwards. Employees are left to manage exposure that should never rest on their shoulders.
“Workarounds are not controls. They are warning signs.”
This is how safety failures happen in large, profitable organisations with safety teams, glossy annual reports, and carefully crafted culture statements.
The other end of the market tells a different story, with the same outcome
At the other end of the spectrum, I have seen a smaller building sector business that grew rapidly without the right supervisory depth, systems, or checks and balances. Funding constraints. Capability gaps. Pressure to deliver.
There were no sophisticated dashboards. No layered assurance models. Just people doing their best in an environment that had outgrown its governance.
The result was devastating. A fatality.
Hindsight is always brutally clear. But boards are not paid to be wise after the event. They are there to anticipate, question, and intervene before tragedy occurs.
“Growth without governance is not ambition. It is risk accumulation.”
Why safety is now a personal duty for directors
Under Australian work health and safety laws, directors and officers have a positive duty of due diligence. The Australian Institute of Company Directors has been explicit on this point.
The AICD states that due diligence requires directors to take reasonable steps to ensure they acquire and keep up‑to‑date knowledge of work health and safety matters, understand the hazards and risks associated with the organisation’s operations, and ensure appropriate resources and processes are in place and actually implemented.
In plain terms, directors cannot rely solely on policies, delegations, or management assurances. They must actively test whether safety systems are real, resourced, and effective.
As the AICD has warned:
“Directors cannot outsource their work health and safety obligations. The duty is personal and continuous.”
In Queensland and other jurisdictions, industrial manslaughter legislation has further sharpened the consequences. Insurance does not protect against everything. Delegation does not absolve responsibility. Paper compliance is not enough.
Yet I still see a dangerous mindset at the board level. It will not happen to us. We have good people. We have systems. We have advisors. We have sign‑offs.
That mindset is a ticking time bomb.
Safety culture fails when boards tolerate known risks
The most troubling pattern I am seeing across the market is this. Safety issues are raised. They are acknowledged. They are documented. And then they are quietly deprioritised because the solution is inconvenient, expensive, or politically difficult.
Employees become the shock absorbers. Safety teams are pressured, implicitly or explicitly, to sign off. Whistleblowers speak up, only to learn the cost of being labelled difficult. Issues do not always reach board level cleanly, or they arrive sanitised and stripped of urgency.
“If bad news is being filtered before it reaches the board, governance has already failed.”
This is not a failure of reporting lines. It is a failure of courage.
What boards must do differently in 2026
If you sit on a board, safety cannot be a standing agenda item that is nodded through. It must be personal.
In practical terms, that means:
- Safety is the first item on every board agenda, not the last
- Directors actively interrogate near misses, not just fatalities
- Known risks managed through workarounds are treated as unacceptable, not tolerable
- Independent external safety audits are commissioned regularly, not only after incidents
- Directors spend time on site, observing real work rather than relying solely on reports
- Escalation pathways are tested to ensure bad news reaches the board unfiltered
- Capital allocation decisions explicitly factor human risk, not just financial return
Being an agitator in the boardroom is not disloyal. It is the job.
“Silence in the boardroom is not neutrality. It is complicity.”
You want to sleep at night
No board can guarantee there will never be an accident or a fatality. But every director should be able to look themselves in the mirror and say they did everything reasonably possible.
What I am seeing across the market suggests we need a fundamental reset in how boards think about safety governance. Not as compliance. Not as culture theatre. But as a deeply personal responsibility.
I am not on the boards of these businesses. Yet I am carrying the weight of the stress borne by employees who know something is wrong and feel powerless to fix it. That alone should tell us something.
“If safety is not keeping directors awake at night, they are not paying enough attention.”
As we look to 2026, put safety at the top of your agenda. Bring in fresh eyes. Challenge assumptions. Spend the money. Ask the uncomfortable questions.
Because the cost of getting it wrong is one no board should ever accept.
If you would like a confidential conversation about board governance, safety culture, or how to strengthen oversight before something goes wrong, connect with us at TigerBoards. We work with boards and directors who take their responsibilities seriously and want governance that stands up when it matters most.
