The safety company and engineer charged over the death of an eight-year-old girl at the Royal Adelaide Show in 2014 are the first parties to be charged with category 1 offences under the WHS Act in South Australia, and among the first in the country.
This latest instalment of OHS Alert's long-running quarterly update series, dating back to 2004, outlines all the major safety and workers' compensation developments in every jurisdiction from January, February and March 2016.
A regulator is cracking down on labour-hire companies and host employers that fraudulently under-declare wages for workers' comp purposes, and has successfully prosecuted two workers for injury fraud, including one who was caught playing cricket and football while receiving total incapacity payments.
In an important case, a tribunal has rejected a regulator's claim that the transitional provisions of South Australia's new Return to Work Act extinguish the lump sum entitlements that an injured worker accrued under the old Act.
In this article, OHS Alert outlines recent safety and workers' comp developments from NSW, Western Australia, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Commonwealth jurisdiction.
The South Australian Government is facing increasing pressure from all sides of politics to reverse the "harsh" 30 per cent whole person impairment threshold in its Return to Work Act. Meanwhile, South Australia has established a new IR body to replace the SafeWork SA Advisory Council and two other committees.
