The organisation operates across manufacturing, wholesale distribution, logistics and infrastructure related environments, with a highly decentralised operating model and a large, geographically dispersed workforce across Australia and New Zealand. The business continues to grow through acquisition and organic expansion and places strong value on practical leadership, operational accountability and respect for its people.
This is a critical executive leadership role with direct exposure to the Managing Director, Executive team and Board.
The Role
Reporting to the Company Secretary, with direct functional access to the Managing Director, you will set and sustain a clear, risk focused health and safety approach across a diverse group of businesses. Your primary objective is to enable operational leaders to own and manage safety risks, while ensuring the organisation maintains a consistent, defensible and scalable framework in an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading the enterprise approach to health and safety in a decentralised operating model
- Providing clear, practical advice to Executive and Board on health and safety risks, performance and emerging issues
- Maintaining oversight of serious risk, high risk activities and incident management across a large multisite footprint
- Owning and evolving the Group WHS management framework, policies and standards aligned to recognised good practice
- Supporting leaders through complex incidents, investigations and regulatory engagement
- Leading a distributed national health and safety team and building capability across the business
- Providing strategic oversight of health, wellbeing and recovery functions, including injury management, workers compensation and psychosocial risk
- Supporting readiness and governance for workers compensation self-insurance
- Ensuring systems, data and reporting deliver meaningful insight to leaders rather than compliance driven outputs
About You
You are a Senior WHS leader with experience operating at enterprise level in complex, operationally intensive environments such as manufacturing, distribution, logistics or similar industries.
You will bring:
- Senior WHS leadership experience within large, multisite organisations
- Experience working in decentralised or highly autonomous operating models
- Strong understanding of WHS legislation and officer due diligence obligations across Australia and New Zealand
- Demonstrated credibility advising Executive teams and Boards
- Experience overseeing health, wellbeing, injury management and psychosocial risk
- Exposure to workers compensation self-insurance or large self-managed schemes is desirable
- A practical, commercially grounded leadership style, with the ability to influence without direct authority
Why this role
This is a rare opportunity to shape health and safety strategy at Group level within a large, established organisation that values operational ownership, trust and long term sustainability. You will play a key role in protecting people, supporting leaders and ensuring the organisation continues to grow with confidence.