Speaking at the opening session of the 2011 APPEA National Oil and Gas Safety Conference, Schubach told the audience the sector needed to shape up.

While commending the industry for a downward trend, Schubach said there was a gulf between the rate of injury on offshore operations in Australia compared to the rate internationally.

There is also a gulf between Australia and the rest of the world in gas release rates, with Australia's rates almost double the amount of its international counterparts.

Schubach also expressed concern about the growing incident rates aboard floating production, storage and offload vessels.

Although NOPSA had the total number of FPSOs at only 15, he said incidents recorded for the year to June were perilously close to the figure for the whole of 2010.

"If you look carefully though in terms of percentage of incidents, FPSOs are an area that industry needs to pay attention to," he urged.

He said while there had been an improvement in gas containment, overall the loss of containment needed attention.

"One of the potential consequences of the large-scale releases is the potential for ignition, fire, explosion and harm," Schubach said.

"You can see there that there is plenty of scope for improvement."

However, he said where there was a shortfall, there was opportunity for greater industry participation to drive better safety outcomes.

"I see that as an opportunity for the strong performers and the not so strong performers to share, so learning with respect to training opportunities," he said.

He highlighted a lack of training and appropriate guidelines as a reason why the industry kept on repeating the same mistakes.

"If you have a look at the underlying cause, you can see a pattern which has not been addressed," he said.

"The continuing problems continue to be in design … the sound, rigorous preventative maintenance and also the issue of following procedures.

"We need to ensure staff are competent, well trained and supported by procedures ... which include a capacity to diagnose failure in systems."

However, with a skills crunch expected to take hold in the next decade, Schubach said he expected retaining key staff and attracting new and competent staff to be one of the biggest challenges facing safety standards in the next five to 10 years.

A lack of procedural adherence led Schubach to call for more independent assessment, claiming there is a large gulf between documented maintenance systems and how maintenance is actually conducted.

He also called on companies to take a greater hands-on role in the Occupation Health and Safety training of contractors, saying while contractors are often considered part of the main workforce, they aren't given the same level of oversight as core employees.

"Don't forget that your contractors need quality training as well as your core workforce," Schubach told EnergyNewsBulletin after his presentation.

He said a rise in damage to safety-critical equipment was also a cause for concern, and although due diligence was starting to be done on aging equipment, not enough had been done.

"In terms of aging facilities, there's a growing recognition of that but the approach is not systematic or comprehensive," Schubach said.

"There are issues around corrosion management [and] critical function testing, and there's an issue, especially with floating facilities … [of] how many of those people pick up."

In delivering his final message to attendees, he reiterated that greater independent assessing was needed, and urged attendees to instil in their employees the ability to step back and take a breath when something went wrong.

"I'd like to remind everybody just how important this issue is. In the order of 25% of incidents involve incomplete procedures, ignored procedures or procedures not followed," he said.

"We need to recognise that procedures need to be treated as dynamic and use the skills to ensure that the procedures are kept up to date in order to reduce risk.

"Quick, but ill-informed judgements of an abnormal situation can be catastrophic - step back, analyse and evaluate, take a thorough look at the facts and then respond."