A workplace supervisor who was initially charged with four counts of manslaughter, in relation to the deaths of four police officers in a road crash, could now be jailed for up to five years for a reckless breach of safety laws, with an appeals court reversing a decision to stay the recklessness case.
WHS laws could be amended to cover the implementation of collision-avoidance technologies and improve the safety of workplace roads, with a regulator finding the technologies are often wrongly viewed as a "silver bullet".
PCBUs' incident notification duties could soon be amended to capture a much broader range of incidents and require periodic reporting of matters like workplace bullying and traumatic events.
An employer is being forced to re-defend its training and safety systems, and to prove it was entitled to rely on a worker to identify safety hazards that required him to seek help, under a retrial ordered in relation to an unrestrained load falling out of a trailer.
An employer has been cleared of WHS breaches relating to an incident where defective plant was left in service and caught fire, forcing workers to seek refuge and survive on stored air until they could be evacuated.
A PCBU has been convicted and fined $255,000 for exposing two "spotters" to the risk of serious injury or death, in a case highlighting that duty holders can be prosecuted and handed hefty fines where injuries have not occurred.
A PCBU with "significant" WHS systems has been fined $525,000 over a fatality, involving its failure to implement a specific documented system of work for a task a worker was performing when he was killed.
A company has been fined $1.2 million for dozens of breaches of the Heavy Vehicle National Law, after it was found to have "encouraged" drivers, through its remuneration structure, to disregard their fatigue obligations nearly 200 times in a five-week period.
