Former Federal S-x Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has been tasked with shifting her focus to a new sector and ensuring employers are complying with their positive duties to prevent harassment and protect the safety of staff.
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.
A court has found a PCBU guilty of WHS breaches after a worker was hit by a forklift, but ruled its failure to separate forklifts and pedestrians was not a failure directly linked to its director's due diligence duties.
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.
The recent major review of a safety regulator should prompt employers to adopt a "two birds, one stone" mindset for managing their health and safety and human resources practices, a senior safety lawyer says.
A worker who claimed her employer bullied and demoralised her for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine has lost her psychological injury case, with a commission finding her commitment as an anti-vaxxer motivated her to "invent exaggerated symptoms".
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.
