On 19 October 2026, Minister for Work Health and Safety Sophie Cotsis stood at a construction site in Kemps Creek, Western Sydney — workers building new wastewater infrastructure behind her — and launched a program built not on regulations and penalty notices, but on people.
The NSW Safety Speakers Program, run by icare and SafeWork NSW, connects workplaces with speakers who have lived through the consequences of unsafe work. Not safety professionals. Not regulators. Workers who were seriously injured. Families of people who were killed.
The program is free to access for any employer who holds an icare Workers Compensation Policy.
Among the speakers is para-athlete Clint Pickin, who lost his foot in a farming accident in 2014 and went on to become one of Australia’s leading wheelchair tennis players. There’s also David Hall, who lost both legs at 16 when he was hit by a car. And Linda Moussa, a member of SafeWork NSW’s Family and Injured Workers Support and Advisory Group, whose husband fell to his death on a construction site in Ryde in October 2016.
These aren’t abstract statistics. These are people who got up, went to work or visited a workplace, and never came home the same.
The program builds on the icare Paralympic Speakers Program that has operated since 2015. The new version broadens that to include voices from the SafeWork NSW FIWSAG — people who bring the perspective of families who have lost someone, not just individuals navigating their own recovery.
Minister Cotsis framed the program’s purpose plainly: “We need to shift attitudes and behaviours towards safety because we know a lot of these incidents are preventable and the ‘she’ll be right attitude’ could cost someone their life.”
SafeWork Commissioner Janet Schorer put it another way: “Lived experience could help translate safety obligations into choices people make every day.”
That is the theory behind the program — that hearing the human cost of a preventable incident, from someone who experienced it, is more effective at changing behaviour than a poster or a procedure. The safety literature is largely on that side of the argument.
This week in National Safe Work Month, with the theme “Safe work is for life,” the timing of the launch is deliberate. The long-term impacts of workplace injuries — on individuals, families, and communities — tend to be underrepresented in how we talk about safety at work. Fines and prosecutions dominate the news. The years of recovery, the marriages under strain, the kids who grew up without a parent — those are harder to quantify.
The Safety Speakers Program is an attempt to make that visible.
Eligible employers can book a speaker through icare.
