Six draft standards close for public comment on Monday, and four of them touch safety

Public comment is the fourth of six stages in the making of an Australian Standard, after project proposal, kick-off and drafting, and before ballot and publication. Standards Australia describes the stage this way: The opportunity to comment on a draft standard allows the community to review the content and direction of the document prior to its completion. It says drafts are open for nine weeks, and that All comments from the public are considered in detail by the technical committee and, if necessary, further drafting is undertaken.

That is a real lever, and it is one most duty holders never pull, usually because they did not know a draft affecting their work was open until it had closed.

Closing Monday, 31 August

Titles are reproduced as the portal lists them, with the portal's own punctuation normalised to commas and the word "Redlined" removed from the front of five of the fifteen titles, where it flags that the draft is presented as a marked-up version of the current standard. Sector and committee codes are the portal's.

Which of those a safety reader should care about is a judgement, and it is ours. The two parts of AS/NZS 3666 govern microbial control in the air-handling and water systems of buildings, which is the standard family behind cooling-tower and warm-water system management; Part 1 covers design, installation and commissioning and Part 2 covers operation and routine service, so between them they reach both the people who build a system and the people who have to keep it safe. AS/NZS 2290.1 is the introduction, inspection and maintenance standard for electrical equipment in coal mines, and the part open now is the hazardous-areas one. AS/NZS 3120 and 3122 are approval and test specifications for cord extension sockets and socket-outlet adaptors, which is portable electrical equipment that turns up on every site in the country.

The rest of the list, and when it closes

Two in that list are worth a diary note. AS/NZS 4761.1, closing 17 September, is the competency standard for working with electrical equipment in hazardous areas, which is a qualification question rather than an equipment one and therefore lands on training budgets. AS 5359, closing 28 October, is the storage and handling of hydrogen, and it is open now, while most Australian workplaces have not yet had to think about hydrogen at all.

How to actually comment, and what we could not establish

The drafts sit at comment.standards.org.au, which lists them and says: Please log-in and follow the instructions to view or make a comment on a draft. Standards Australia's process page separately notes that in some cases the committee may propose to combine public comment and approval (ballot) of the standard, depending on the complexity of the proposals and the level of consultation needed.

We could not establish from the portal what registration involves, because the login sits behind a client-side form that returns the same landing page to a plain request. We are not going to tell you it is free and open to anyone when we have not seen the terms. What we can tell you is that the list above is public, the dates are the portal's own, and Monday is Monday.