An upstream duty holder has been prosecuted and fined for providing plant with a manual that was missing safety instructions for inspection and cleaning tasks. Another duty holder has been fined for failing to provide a demarcated safety zone for delivery drivers, which led to a double amputation.
The High Court has agreed to consider quashing the application of allegedly outdated judgments that bar damages for psychiatric injuries caused by dismissal processes, in the case of a worker who was subjected to a sham dismissal after an incident on a work trip.
Another employer has been fined for workplace health and safety breaches affecting children, with its failures including not maintaining a safe supervision ratio of employees to customers.
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.
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.
An employer has pleaded guilty to 16 safety breaches and been hit with $545,000 in fines, including over fire safety failures that led to staff using a flammable liquid and cardboard instead of a fire extinguisher to put out a fire on a machine and on two workers.
A company director who bullied a subcontractor for four years, and abused him for raising safety concerns to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, has been convicted of workplace health and safety contraventions.
The fine imposed on an employer that failed to fully implement a mandatory safety measure, because it ran out of the required materials, has been increased more than five-fold on appeal, with a judge stressing penalties must be significant enough to dissuade others from "cutting corners".
A company has been convicted and fined $1.3 million in Victoria's first finalised workplace manslaughter case. Its director was also charged with manslaughter, but pleaded guilty to a less serious offence.