Browsing: Authority/inspectorate (NSW) | Page 10

A judge has rebuked a PCBU for claiming a WHS regulator should have done more to educate operators like it in an emerging sector, finding the PCBU "clearly" failed to keep abreast of its safety duties, and fining it $180,000 over a four-metre fall.

An employer has been fined $360,000 after a worker fell nine metres from a roof and sustained severe injuries, in a case that compelled the sentencing judge to repeat his warning about an industry's workplace health and safety "carnage".

Qantas has failed in its second attempt to stay proceedings, which include alternative charges, involving its alleged discriminatory conduct against an elected health and safety representative in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a unique case, the Ambulance Service of NSW has been fined nearly $200,000 for category-3 WHS breaches, after its auditing processes failed to reveal that a worker was tampering with vials of the opioid fentanyl for personal use.

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.

An ongoing investigation into an incident that could have resulted in a major methane explosion in a mine has highlighted the WHS duties to implement and maintain ventilation control plans underpinned by frequent inspections and tests.

• Fatality charge coincides with industrial gate warning;
  
• Long-term WHS exemption expiring in NSW; and
  
• Comcare releases Q&A on new psychosocial regulations.

A commission full bench has affirmed an earlier ruling revoking a WHS regulator's improvement notice issued to a site's principal contractor after a fatal fall.

A senior judge has described the ongoing spate of injuries and deaths in the roofing industry as "carnage", adding that the vast majority of incidents could have been avoided by using simple "well-known and effective safety precepts".

A PCBU has been fined for category-3 WHS breaches at a site where a fatality occurred - an incident that also led to the largest WHS-undertaking spend in NSW history.