The Australian regulatory framework for preventing harassment and bullying at work

Australian labour law has been slow to address the serious effects of psychosocial issues, on workers, their families, and workplaces. To the extent that it has taken a preventive approach these issues, the focus has been on harassment and bullying at work. In the past decade or two, there have been three significant measures in Australian law aimed at eliminating, or at least reducing the incidence of, harassment and bullying at work: a focus on harassment and bullying in the work health and safety regulatory framework; a strengthening of the crime of stalking; and new anti-bulling provisions in the Commonwealth Fair Work Act 2009 empowering the federal industrial relations tribunal to make orders to prevent bullying at work. This chapter briefly examines the first two of these measures, and then analyses the first three years of the new anti-bullying jurisdiction of the Fair Work Commission.