A workplace fatality happens roughly once every two days in Australia. Behind every one of those statistics sits a family, a team and an organisation that believed its systems were sound. Safety has moved well past the compliance folder. It now sits on the same agenda as strategy, culture and leadership, which is exactly where the right Speaker earns their place.
Saxton represents the region's most credible voices on Workplace Health & Safety, from decorated Antarctic expedition leaders and emergency physicians to survivors who rebuilt their lives after the incident that changed everything. Below are ten Speakers worth knowing, and the audiences each one lands best with.
Why Safety Culture Is a Leadership Priority
Workplace safety used to be measured by lost time injury rates and audit scores. That measure was never wrong, but it was incomplete. Boards and executive teams now understand that a genuinely safe workplace is a psychological one as much as a physical one, and that the two cannot be separated without the system eventually failing somewhere.
Regulators have caught up to this thinking. Industrial manslaughter laws now operate in most Australian states, psychosocial hazards sit inside WHS legislation as a named duty, and workers themselves report incidents faster in cultures where speaking up carries no penalty. None of that happens through a policy update. It happens through leadership behaviour, repeated and modelled, under pressure and in the room, not just in the handbook.
The Right Voice Changes How Safety Lands
Name recognition fills a room. Relevance changes behaviour once people leave it. Saxton's research into audience engagement consistently shows that a Speaker whose story or expertise maps precisely onto the audience's own risk profile outperforms a bigger name with a generic message, and safety is the category where this gap shows up most starkly.
A mining crew and a corporate head office are not the same audience, even when both sit inside the same organisation. A team managing extreme isolation needs a different register from an executive team setting policy from a distance. The Speakers below were chosen for that range, lived experience alongside clinical expertise, elite performance under pressure alongside legal and cultural authority, so that whatever your event and whichever part of the workforce is in the room, there is a genuine fit rather than a compromise.
Matt Formston
Matt Formston was told at five, when a degenerative condition left him with three per cent vision, that he would never hold a job or live independently. He went on to run two elite careers at once. A senior executive at Optus by day and a multi-sport world champion by night, he became a Cycling World Champion, competed at the Rio Paralympics, and in 2023 won the Heavy Water Award for Australia's best big wave surfer, sighted or otherwise. He now speaks on risk, resilience and the Business Trust framework he built from fifteen years of boardrooms and fifty foot swells.
Best suited to leadership audiences wanting a genuine lens on risk tolerance, inclusion and performance under extreme pressure.
David Knoff
David Knoff was the Station Leader at Davis Station, Antarctica, in 2019 when COVID-19 stranded his 24 person team without a way home, extending their isolation into one of the longest in modern Antarctic history. A former Australian Army officer with diplomatic postings in Pakistan and Iraq, David draws on six Antarctic expeditions and two warzones to speak on leading remote, isolated teams through genuine uncertainty.
Best suited to leadership teams managing remote workforces, extended isolation or high-consequence environments where communication and decision-making cannot fail.
Dan Haesler
Dan Haesler is a performance and leadership coach who works with the Penrith Panthers, the NSW Swifts, and members of the Wallabies and Socceroos, alongside corporate clients across Asia Pacific. His bestselling book, The Act of Leadership, argues that psychological safety and mindset are inseparable from performance, a case he makes with the rigour of research and the credibility of working inside elite sporting environments.
Best suited to leadership teams wanting the link between mental skills, safety culture and sustained high performance made explicit
Dr Jorian Kippax
Dr Jorian Kippax was part of the specialist medical team that rescued a whitewater rafter trapped in freezing rapids on the Franklin River in 2024, performing an underwater amputation to free him and save his life. For this, the President of Lithuania awarded Jo the country's Life Saving Cross. He draws on a career in emergency medicine, disaster response and search and rescue to speak on composure, clinical decision-making and team leadership when the stakes are highest.
Best suited to emergency services, healthcare and any high-risk operational team wanting a firsthand account of leadership under acute pressure.
Kate Jenkins AO
Kate Jenkins AO spent seven years as Australia's Sex Discrimination Commissioner, leading the landmark Respect@Work national inquiry into sexual harassment, with the Federal Government committing to implement all 55 recommendations in full. She now chairs the Australian Sports Commission and speaks on cultural reform in workplaces that have had to confront exactly the kind of psychosocial hazard now written into WHS law.
Best suited to boards, government agencies and organisations navigating psychosocial risk and respect at work obligations.
Darren Flanagan
In 2006, Darren Flanagan operated more than 70 explosives over a continuous 30 hour stretch underground during the Beaconsfield mine rescue, helping free two men trapped nearly a kilometre below the surface. He now speaks on the trauma, leadership and resilience that followed, using one of the most recognisable safety events in Australian history to open conversations that policy documents rarely reach.
Best suited to high-risk industries and crisis-exposed teams wanting a credible voice on leadership under extreme pressure.
Theo Venter
Theo Venter was electrocuted by 22,000 volts while working on live powerlines, spending three days in hospital fighting to survive. His presentation, delivered with slides of his own injuries and recovery, is built for frontline audiences who see safety warnings every week and have stopped hearing them. Few Speakers change a room's relationship with a toolbox talk as fast.
Best suited to utilities, construction and any frontline crew where safety messaging has become background noise.
Anton Guinea
At 21, Anton Guinea survived a near fatal workplace incident as an apprentice electrician. Fifteen years on, he has worked with more than 150 businesses globally on what he calls conscious control, a combined approach to psychological and physical safety built on empathetic leadership rather than fear-based compliance. His own story gives the framework weight that a slide deck alone never could.
Best suited to high-risk industries such as construction, energy and manufacturing, particularly where frontline supervisors are the target audience.
Jessica Hickman
Jessica Hickman is the author of The Upstander Leader, an internationally award-winning book on building speak-up cultures, and the co-founder of People Powered, a leadership and change consultancy. Her TEDx talk on the risks of bystanding has reached global audiences, and she has been formally recognised in NSW Parliament for her contribution to workplace culture change. Her approach centres on sensemaking, helping leaders understand the systems and pressures driving behaviour rather than reaching for surface level fixes.
Best suited to organisations building a genuine speak-up culture, particularly where psychosocial safety and bystander behaviour are live issues.
Helen Fitzroy
Helen Fitzroy's commitment to workplace safety began the day her husband died in an underground mining accident in Western Australia, leaving her a widow at 33 with three young children. Her book, Just a Number, is now used throughout the resources sector to illustrate the human cost behind every safety statistic. For two decades she has campaigned for both improved mine safety and better support for bereaved families.
Best suited to resources and mining audiences, and any organisation wanting the human consequence of a fatality made real rather than abstract.
How to Choose the Right Safety Speaker for Your Audience
Corporate and WHS teams generally respond best to research-backed thinking on culture and leadership. Dan Haesler, Kate Jenkins and Jessica Hickman each translate psychosocial safety and cultural reform into frameworks a governance-minded audience can act on immediately.
High-risk industries, including mining, construction and utilities, are usually better served by lived experience and industry-specific credibility. Darren Flanagan, Helen Fitzroy, Theo Venter and Anton Guinea each bring direct exposure to the kind of incident their audience is trying to prevent.
Remote, isolated or emergency-exposed teams need a different register again. David Knoff and Jorian Kippax both speak from genuine experience of leading and operating when the margin for error is smallest.
Leadership audiences wanting a fresh lens on risk and resilience are well matched with Matt Formston, whose story reframes risk tolerance and inclusion through elite performance rather than incident recovery alone.
Book a Workplace Health & Safety Speaker Through Saxton
Choosing the right Workplace Health & Safety Speaker is less about the biggest name and more about the closest fit to the room you are standing in front of. Saxton's team has placed Speakers across every one of these settings and can talk through your event, your audience and your desired outcome before recommending anyone. Enquire with our team to start the conversation or browse our extended line-up of Workplace Health & Safety Speakers if you would like more options before you do.
