Is this Your Safety?
The marketing for the Zero Congress in November in Sydney has started 3 months prior to the fiasco and there’s no doubt about it, Safety is the industry that just keeps on giving.
But don’t just believe me, just look at the key messages.
First cab off the rank is Zero. Here’s your zero invitation from p. 7 Congress Program).
There you go, Zero gets 4 mentions and the most repeated language in the message. Don’t be in doubt, this is a Zero congress for the Zero Industry with Zero as the Common Denominator (https://safetyrisk.net/the-dominance-of-zero-as-the-common-denominator-of-safety/).
The reality is, Zero is the greatest cause of mental health harm and psychosocial harm in all of industry. There is no greater cause of brutalism than this religious mantra, ideology and psychosis (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/zero-the-great-safety-delusion/).
This message of Zero works in really well with the ‘clarion call’ for the Congress about mental health. Please note the word ‘hazards’ is silenced when the language of psychosocial health is concerned in the program.
Of course, a clarion call is a ‘demand’, typical of an industry that never speaks of power, ethics, learning, relationships, persons, care or helping. These are all missing from the discourse of the program.
After all, if you are going to brutalise people in the name of good, you must ensure that ethics is NOT on the program.
Note the language change. The language of ‘hazards’ is omitted, when it is the title of every Standard and Code of Practice.
Next is a range of animations for the Zero Congress that saturate social media with typical safety messaging. Such as, Safety is About:
Hard Hats and Checklists.
Slips, Trips and Falls
The Addiction to Measurement
Mental Health is About Machines
Mental Health is About Masses of Paperwork
There is no doubt about this one, masses of paperwork will give you a mental health condition and is of course madness because the more you do, the more it will be used against you in court: https://vimeo.com/162034157
Wellness is About Productivity and Retention
How to Manage New Forms of Risk Like, Driving a Truck
Evangelism
This language resonates well with fundamentalist evangelical stuff, just like the apocalyptic video – Spirit of Zero In the Blink of an Eye. (https://safetyrisk.net/the-spirit-of-zero/). Just watch the video how Zero restores limbs and bodies in. the same language as St Paul.
Conclusion
So, we see nothing new in any of this despite all the spin of innovation and creativity. It’s the same old tired safety stuff but with a more expensive price tag.
And all the associations will be there singing the same hymns from the same song sheet and, nothing will change. More zero, more of the same, more brutalism announced as ‘good’.
The evidence is pictured above. Is this your safety?
Prof. Robert Long
Latest posts by Prof. Robert Long (see all)
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- The Evolution of Safety Beliefs and Rhetoric - June 6, 2026
- The Ethics of Safety Beliefs and Cognitive Dissonance - June 4, 2026
I am suffering from cognitive dissonance!
Per Dom Cooper, expert in safety metrics, wrote on LinkedIn “LTIR/TRIR metrics should be taken with a large pinch of salt given that they are highly susceptible to bias. These biases are primarily concerned with misclassification of the severity of incidents and under-reporting, which means the metrics are unreliable (i.e., they lack consistency). If a measure is unreliable, it must also be invalid, as the two are inextricably linked [[xvi]].” (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dom-cooper-616349a_take-with-a-large-pinch-of-salt-shp-health-activity-7097878828802260994-uFet?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop)
Now we have Vision Zero ad saying “The ISSA vision, zero strategy offers easy to implement solutions for companies and policy makers. In fact there are companies that have managed to reduce their loss time injury, frequency rate, by adopting the vision zero.”
Yet Dom uses those very statistics to back up the success of his BBS programs?
Dom is a behaviourist and behaviorism is a philosophy/methodology. So, we need to understand his comments in the light of this philosophy. As for measurement, the darling of safety, there is no measurement of safety. It is a delusion and myth. Injury rates are attributed as meaningful and they are not. Claims to zero ‘working’ by ISSA is just spin/propaganda and marketing. There is no connection or evidence between the discourse of zero and the humanisation of risk. The evidence is to the contrary, zero demonizes persons and therefore doesn’t work. Any methodology that demonizes persons cannot ‘work’. This is the ideology of Zero.
As for Dom ‘expert in metrics’, yeah in his own lunch box. You can’t separate the language of metrics and numerics from the philosophy that drives it, the philosophy of Technique. Efficiency should not be the measure of whether something works or not. All of this projection by Cooper and the ideology of measurement has no connection to humans or human ‘being’.
Rob, I agree with you , nothing new, selling zero, selling ways of further controlling, I wonder if the risk and safety industry will ever move away from these mantras and goals that are impossible to achieve´, except building mistrust and sense of failure.