Harmonised WHS laws and their prescriptive consultation requirements have been in place in most jurisdictions for more than a decade, but there have been few duty-to-consult prosecutions. According to a WHS lawyer, this could be because regulators prefer to conflate consultation failings with more serious breaches to pursue higher penalties.
The workplace safety prosecutions of a company, a senior officer and three workers - relating to a death and a non-fatal incident - have been allowed to proceed, with a judge quashing an earlier decision to strike out the complaints for technical reasons, including that some were filed in the wrong court.
A worker was distracted by the death of a colleague, and fatigued from 26 consecutive days of work, when he was "cleared" as "fit" by an unqualified counsellor to perform a dangerous loading task, and then killed in an exclusion zone, a coronial inquest has found.
PCBUs will soon be: required to proactively facilitate the election of health and safety representatives; banned from blocking WHS entry permit holders through technicalities or impractical induction requirements; and handed on-the-spot fines for failing to provide adequate toilets, under review recommendations accepted in Queensland.
This major user-friendly report looks back at all the major and most interesting workplace safety and compensation developments from the start of the calendar year, including the ministerial vote on industrial manslaughter, multiple manslaughter charges, the widespread introduction of new psychosocial risk regulations, and a major WHS case involving the deaths of overseas students.
The Fair Work Commission has upheld the dismissal of a financial adviser who refused to take a drug and alcohol test after turning up to work showing signs of intoxication.
An organisation's WHS risk manager breached safety laws by failing - over a period of more than three years - to finalise a risk assessment for an infectious disease, a prosecutor has revealed.
