A commission has rejected a worker's allegations that she was forced to resign because her employer failed to shield her from vicarious trauma and its approach to psychological safety was "stuck in the 1990s".
An upstream duty holder has been prosecuted and fined for providing plant with a manual that was missing safety instructions for inspection and cleaning tasks. Another duty holder has been fined for failing to provide a demarcated safety zone for delivery drivers, which led to a double amputation.
A union and one of its officials have been handed fines totalling nearly $37,000, after a court found the latter made a frustrated comment that constituted a threat to the future career of a workplace health and safety manager.
All work processes where workers might be exposed to respirable silica will be considered high risk and subjected to tougher WHS regulations unless risk assessments prove otherwise, under one of a string of changes agreed by Australia's WHS ministers.
An appeals court has quashed a ruling that the WHS prosecution of a major company was invalid because of the process used to delegate the applicable regulatory powers. Meanwhile, a play centre has been charged with multiple safety breaches after a child fell seven metres.
The High Court has agreed to consider quashing the application of allegedly outdated judgments that bar damages for psychiatric injuries caused by dismissal processes, in the case of a worker who was subjected to a sham dismissal after an incident on a work trip.
Another employer has been fined for workplace health and safety breaches affecting children, with its failures including not maintaining a safe supervision ratio of employees to customers.
The full written reasons for Victoria's first workplace manslaughter conviction have outlined four key differences between the case and Australia's first industrial manslaughter prosecution in 2020. They also show the defendant's director should not have moved a forklift "another inch" until he was fully aware of the location of a pedestrian worker.
In the latest of a recent series of WHS prosecutions involving failures affecting vulnerable people like children, a teacher based in another country has been sentenced over the deaths of two teenage students in Australia.