WorkSafe Victoria has launched a confronting new campaign highlighting the message that farm deaths and life-changing injuries could happen to anyone if they don’t prioritise the importance of safety.
Executive Director of Health and Safety at WorkSafe Victoria, Julie Nielsen said the campaign’s key message, ‘It’s never you, until it is’, aimed to challenge a common mindset among farmers and agriculture workers that a serious incident wouldn’t happen to them.
“Farmers know their land and machinery like the back of their hand, but that doesn’t make you bulletproof,” Ms Nielsen said.
“It might be easy to think that a tragic incident will never happen on your farm, but if safety is not your top priority then the chances are high that it will,” she said.
“Farmers owe it to themselves, their families, their workers and communities to always keep safety front of mind and make it a permanent part of their daily life.”
Ms Nielsen said the campaign shows that experience alone doesn’t prevent workplace incidents on farms.
She said the emotional story telling of the campaign targets owner-operator farmers, their workers and families, to bring home the cost of not taking a safety-first approach.
“Agriculture remains one of the State’s most dangerous industries, with 24 people dying as a result of on-farm workplace incidents in the past three years,” she said.
“Last year alone, 424 people working in agriculture, or about eight people every week, were injured seriously enough to make a worker’s compensation claim.”
Ms Nielsen said the campaign was part of a wider push to shift attitudes around farm safety under WorkSafe’s Agriculture Strategy 2020-2023.
The campaign’s video message, with sound, can be accessed at this PS News link.
