Browsing: Fatalities | Page 2

An employer has been fined $800,000 for WHS breaches, after a designated work site migrated onto a dangerous stretch of road and a worker was killed by a vehicle driven by a colleague.

A major work health and safety Bill has passed in Queensland, with amendments aimed at facilitating a plan that could extend industrial manslaughter provisions to bystander deaths, and ensure multiple duty holders can be charged with manslaughter after a fatality.

• Safety fines doubled to $10m under NSW asbestos Bill;
  
• Industrial manslaughter promised ahead of Tas election;
  
• Manslaughter jailings needed, says union after Vic fatality; and
  
• Ten WHS Codes amended for GHS 7 in SA.

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.

• Delayed harassment complaint highlights WHS duties;
  
• Alleged ladder breaches lead to death; and
  
• WHS duty holders relying too much on harnesses.

A PCBU has been handed a pre-discount WHS fine of $400,000, after a worker was fatally struck on the head while performing maintenance work on a machine at a site that was subject to multiple improvement notices.

A workplace supervisor has been sentenced for recklessly allowing a drug-affected truck driver to drive and kill four police officers, but cleared of allegations he would have known the driver was in an unfit state just by looking at him. He was originally charged with four counts of manslaughter.

A PCBU has lost its last-resort bid to block its WHS prosecution over the drowning deaths of a father and son, with a superior court describing its latest jurisdictional challenge as an "unacceptable fragmentation of the criminal proceeding".

An appeals court has upheld the acquittals of two PCBUs charged over the hypothermia death of a helicopter pilot, confirming that the "cascading" series of WHS measures they allegedly failed to adopt were not reasonably practicable.