All of Australia's eight harmonised WHS jurisdictions have now formally applied or committed to adopting provisions explicitly requiring PCBUs to manage psychosocial risks through a risk management process.
A worker who was injured during a car trip between home and work was injured "in the course of carrying out the duties of her employment" because she was transporting a suitcase of files between two offices at the time, an appeals bench has ruled.
The fact that an employer was capable of charging clients for a worker's travel time was one of five "connections" establishing a link between the worker's injury-causing journey and his employment, a judge has ruled.
In this major must-read report, OHS Alert examines all the key workplace health and safety and workers' compensation developments from the second quarter of 2023, including a wide range of actual and proposed WHS amendments, a string of high-profile safety prosecutions, and concerns around surging burnout rates.
PCBUs have been reminded of their WHS duties to children, after one entity was fined over a drowning death and another over a forklift joyride. Meanwhile, the ACT has launched a campaign against workplace violence, and reminded employers of the new WHS duty to report "actual or suspected" incidents of workplace s-xual assault.
An employer is liable for a fatal heart attack a worker suffered in a hotel gym on an overseas work trip, because its WHS and fitness-for-work policy implicitly encouraged him to exercise to counter stress and fatigue, a tribunal has confirmed on remittal.
A court has stressed the importance of employers instilling a "safety consciousness" in young workers, in sentencing a PCBU whose safety breaches brought "shock, trauma, ongoing pain and disfigurement" to a teenage worker in an instant.
