Speech: Comcare CEO Colin Radford, Comcare National Conference

Introduction

Thank you, Virginia – it’s good to see you and great to have you back as MC this year.

And thank you Aunty Mary for that very warm welcome to country.

I’ll begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land we’re meeting on, the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to elders past and present. I extend those respects to any First Nations people who may be joining us throughout the conference.

I also want to acknowledge and thank the very many First Nations people I have had the privilege to know and work with, for your generosity and guidance in helping me to better understand and appreciate my own connection to the lands and waters of my home.

Good morning, everyone and welcome to the 2026 Comcare National Conference.

We have a record attendance this year – almost 1,000 delegates from across the country – bringing together their expertise and experience of work health and safety, rehabilitation, recovery and return to work. Be that through lived experience; as a regulator; a practitioner; an advocate or leading edge research.

We have some incredible minds, incredible energy and an unwavering commitment to reducing workplace harm and improving outcomes for those who have been injured or made ill through their work.  

Across the next two days, we are going to harness that experience, that energy and that passion to drive meaningful, lasting change toward safer and healthier workplaces.

We have an action-packed event for you, with keynote speakers including:

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, The Honourable Amanda Rishworth

Tennis star and mental health advocate Jelena Dokic

• Kindness Factory founder Kath Koschel
• Inclusion advocate and former AFL player Mitch Brown
• Futurist Ben Hamer; and
• Safe Work Australia CEO Marie Boland.

Beyond the keynotes, there are engaging panel sessions and more than 30 concurrent sessions covering topics including:

• Prevention and early intervention
• Rehabilitation and return to work
• Psychosocial hazards and wellbeing; and
• The future of workplace safety.

I also hope to meet some of you at the National Museum of Australia tonight for an evening of connection and celebration at the conference dinner. Adam Goodes – advocate for Indigenous Australians, 2014 Australian of the Year and dual AFL Brownlow Medallist – will be joining us for a fireside chat with our MC, Virginia Trioli.

I particularly want to welcome the successful applicants in our Bursary Program. This is aimed at providing development and networking opportunities to WHS and injury management professionals in smaller Australian Government agencies operating in regional and remote areas.

We’re joined by colleagues from:

• Aboriginal Hostels Limited
• Australian Institute of Marine Science
• Cotton Research and Development Corporation; and
• Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation.

Conference theme

This year’s conference theme is a simple but powerful one: A people-centred approach to work health and safety.

It’s about walking in the shoes of the people we’re here to support – seeing the world of work through their eyes to make our workplaces safer and healthier. And to support those who have been injured to return to health and return to safe work.

We’ll be looking at how wellbeing, diversity, inclusion and empowerment underpin sustainable safety outcomes, especially during this period of rapid change.

Another focus of the program is the safety challenges in an increasingly diverse workforce that now incorporates up to five generations of Australians.

We’ll look at how the different generations experience work, manage psychosocial safety risks, and achieve work-life balance.

With an audience that broadly represents our jurisdiction, I’d also like to touch on some of Comcare’s current priorities and some changes in approach.

This work reflects the conference theme, and it’s at the heart of everything we do – our reason for being – preventing workplace harm and improving outcomes for injured workers.

Regulatory approach

The first thing I want to emphasise is that we are taking a stronger regulatory stance.

We’re going to do some things differently from what you may have experienced in the past.

You may have noticed that Comcare’s public voice on regulatory outcomes has been louder lately.

And with good reason. We’ve had some very strong enforcement results this past year.

Among them:

• A record $1.1 million court penalty – the largest ever imposed in our jurisdiction; and
• The first conviction of a Commonwealth employer for failing to manage psychosocial risks.

In the ten months since I joined Comcare as CEO, it’s fair to say that I’ve encountered some confusion about Comcare’s role.

So let me be clear. Comcare is the regulator.

We’re not consultants or service providers.

We are the regulator.

Yes, we will educate, but we will also enforce.

We will be collaborative, but we won't compromise.

We will regulate compliance with the law – nothing more, nothing less.

Going forward we’ll be focussing our regulatory efforts and resources on areas where the most harm is occurring, or likely to occur, and we’ll be taking a more proactive approach.

There will be a significant increase in unannounced workplace inspections by Comcare.

And, where warranted, you can expect to see more improvement notices, and more prohibition notices for high-risk areas.

Now I recognise that the principles of better regulation include reducing unnecessary regulatory burden. I accept that.

What I can’t accept is the notion that some workplace harm is simply unavoidable. Or that protecting the health and wellbeing of workers is too heavy a cross to bear.

We will never resile from the fact that every workplace death and serious injury is entirely preventable. Every single one.

No profit, no productivity improvement, no corner cut is a worth the price of a human life.

As I said earlier, Comcare’s role is to regulate, and where necessary, enforce compliance with the law.

Preventing workplace harm is up to all of us.

Return to work

The second area I want to highlight requires a step change in the way we think about workers compensation.

The earliest forms of social insurance date back to Germany in the 1880s, when Otto von Bismarck introduced the Accident Insurance Bill, aimed at providing pensions for labourers injured in hazardous industries.

While the breadth of coverage has thankfully changed over time, our notion of compensation has remained largely the same.

And the sad reality is that people rarely get better by staying on compensable injury schemes for longer.

I’ve spent the best part of three decades working in personal injury insurance – across road trauma, workers compensation and medical indemnity – and the one thing all these schemes have in common is that the longer people stay in them, the lesser their chance of recovery becomes.

All of these schemes, the world over, require you to regularly demonstrate how unwell you are, in order to maintain your income or treatment support. And then we wonder why people don’t get better.

That’s not a criticism of Comcare or any other scheme.

And I’m not for a minute suggesting that long tail insurance does not have a critical and ongoing role to play.

But we need to change the ecosystem. We need to shift from a compensation or pension model, to a focus on recovery and return to safe work.

For Comcare’s part, we need to think of ourselves not as a workers’ compensation scheme, but as a recovery and return to work scheme.

The other shift we need to make is in how we think about return to work and our definition of an employer.

This is especially relevant in the context of the APS.

Under our legislation, employers are required to take all reasonable steps to provide suitable employment for employees who are undertaking or have completed a rehabilitation program.

For ongoing employees of an Australian Government department or agency, suitable employment is any employment within the Commonwealth.

In other words, it doesn’t mean that an injured worker can only return to the agency where they were injured, to the source of their trauma.

Sometimes this is simply not possible, especially in the case of psychological injury.

But that shouldn’t mean we just give up on that person. It doesn’t remove their utility or the value that they can contribute to society, to their community and the economy.

We spend an enormous amount of time as a nation talking about productivity. And we have this incredible resource available if only we think differently about where and how that resource can be deployed.

For those Commonwealth agencies represented here, we need to think of the Commonwealth government, as we do in so many other ways, as one employer – and to think about a return to work to the APS, not just an individual agency.

I want to highlight some work Comcare has begun that speaks directly to this opportunity.

Suitable Employment Opportunities Pilot

For its part, Comcare has established the Suitable Employment Opportunities Pilot – a cross-agency initiative to help APS workers recovering from injury or illness to rebuild capacity, confidence, and skills through meaningful work and mobility between agencies.

It’s about expanding pathways for sustainable recovery when a return to pre-injury employment isn’t feasible.

It involves participating APS agencies putting forward vacant positions with Comcare then matching them to an employee with a workers’ compensation claim from another participating agency.

It starts with a short-term placement, with a view to working towards a secondment or a temporary or permanent transfer.

There is so much that we do across the APS that looks toward consistency. This is an area we need to add to that: thinking collectively about how we support our people to recover and return to safe work.

When Comcare engages with APS agencies, this is the conversation we want to have.

At the end of the day, we’re talking about people.

It’s always worth reminding ourselves that no one becomes a client of a compensable injury scheme by choice. They first have to have suffered a traumatic, often life-changing experience.

The people who we support are often at their most vulnerable. And we should never lose sight of that.

Equally, we should never move away from the dignity of work, and the extraordinary benefits – particularly for mental health – that derive from safe, satisfying work.  

We have a great opportunity to see return to work through a different lens, and to act on it.

There is collective responsibility with individual accountability here. We all have a role to play. And we’re equally responsible for the outcomes that can be achieved.

Conclusion

Hopefully, I’ve given you something to think about – even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything I’ve said this morning.

That’s the beauty of an event such as this Conference – a platform for robust, open conversations where we have people with diverse perspectives and experience who can challenge assumptions and inspire fresh thinking.

In closing, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary work that’s gone into delivering this event from so many people across Comcare.  

And, of course, a huge thank you to our partners for recognising the importance of work health and safety and making the conference possible.

I hope everyone makes the most of the opportunities to share best practice, be challenged by presentations and build valuable networks.

Thanks again for joining us and have a great conference.

ENDS