Delacombe trench deaths should inform future contract choices; council

The City of Ballarat on Wednesday adopted an updated procurement policy with increased emphasis on contractors' past occupational health and safety (OHS) performance.

The new policy received unanimous support from councillors who acknowledged something "needed to happen" after the tragic deaths of 21-year-old Jack Brownlee and 34-year-old Charlie Howkins at a Ballarat work site in 2018.

That contractor was convicted and fined $550,000 over the deaths, however the council subsequently awarded it further tenders, prompting a protest rally at Trades Hall in 2022.

Trades and Labour Council Secretary Brett Edgington attended Wednesday night's council meeting to make a number of "corrections" to the draft policy's OHS performance scoring system, which the council agreed to incorporate.

Mr Edgington said Trades Hall's stance was that any "companies with a track record of providing an unsafe workplace should be excluded from tendering from any government contracts at all levels of government".

But he accepted the new policy - with suggested tweaks informed by Jack's father Dave Brownlee and Charlie's wife Dr Lana Cormie - would be an improvement on the previous.

Former Mayor Cr Daniel Moloney said a meeting with Jack and Charlie's families in 2022 was "one of the most touching" he'd had in his time as a councillor and had made "quite a profound impact".

He acknowledged the draft policy was "not perfect" but said it was "definitely a major step in the right direction" and represented a good balance between fairness to industry and having "community money reflect community values".

"We need to make sure we have safe operators but also a fairness to the system that allows or acknowledges that sometimes isolated issues can occur," he said.

"If there are those isolated - horrific but isolated - incidents then a company can still continue to operate and tender to council.

"But if you have systemic issues, if you're genuinely not demonstrating that you are a safe operator, I don't know why we would want to be engaging that type of business in the first place."

Central Ward Cr Mark Harris agreed workplace deaths had "brought into sharp focus" OHS compliance.

"I do feel sorry for businesses in many respects too," Cr Harris said.

"My family company were a cabinet making business - in a high risk industry, where people lost fingers and limbs - and I can remember the visceral pain that you'd have in a small company when someone was injured.

"It was never well-reflected in the workers' compensation, it was never well-reflected in the legislation of the time and the OHS safeguards weren't as good as they should be - but this is helping, this is helping a lot."

Central Ward Cr Belinda Coates said it was "hard to imagine" the impact on families who'd lost loved ones to OHS failings.

She said councillors "should always be aiming to do our best but then when we know better, we need to do better".

"From where we sit, it's a pretty awful situation to acknowledge the loss that people have experienced as a result of their loved ones and family members not coming home safely from work and in fact not coming home alive," she said.

Dr Cormie and Mr Brownlee told The Courier in a joint statement:

"We are pleased to see the City of Ballarat making positive moves towards more ethical procurement, but we think there is more room for improvement.

"Workers' safety must be the unambiguous priority for any tender to be successful.

"Ratepayers expect their money to be used responsibly, with safe companies being rewarded.

"We look forward to the council leading further positive change in championing workers' safety."

The council will review the new policy in six months' time.

Ballarat's strengthening of OHS performance measures comes after the Howkins and Brownlee families helped push for statewide industrial manslaughter laws, which came into effect in 2020.

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