A new policy direction in Australian offshore safety regulation

Introduction As described elsewhere in this volume, a series of disasters in the offshore oil and gas industry in the 1980s led to a major change in regulatory policy regarding offshore safety. Prior to that time, regulations detailing prescriptive requirements focussed on control of activities in the field. These were replaced by a risk-based form of self regulation in which operating companies are required to make a case for safety that demonstrates risk to workers is as low as reasonably practicable. In this chapter, it is argued that regulation continues, however, to ignore important lessons about accident causation derived from the expanding body of social science research into industrial disasters. The chapter begins by outlining what has been learnt about accident causation from a specific case, a blowout during development drilling at the Montara oilfield off the north-west coast of Australia in 2009, and the regulatory failures that allowed this accident to occur. The chapter then addresses regulatory policy developments that have led to widespread adoption of the safety case concept and efforts to demonstrate the effectiveness of this form of safety regulation. Sociological explanations for industrial accidents and the contrast between these theories and the approaches to risk assessment and safety built into regulatory frameworks are then explored.