Employers will be explicitly required to add "critical controls", as defined in international guidelines, to their safety management systems, under legislative amendments aimed at "facilitating the growth in high-reliability organisational (HRO) behaviour" in the resources sector.
Injured workers, and their employers, will be better protected from costly secondary psychological injuries by new provisions requiring insurers to actively provide early intervention services. The provisions are included in a Queensland Bill, which also creates Australia's longest list of cancers presumed, for workers' comp purposes, to be caused by firefighting duties.
The Fair Work Commission has declined to make orders in a rare decision from its stop-s-xual-harassment jurisdiction, but hinted that sending "vile" text messages to colleagues could attract such an order.
The jailing of an operations manager, the passage of right-to-disconnect laws and significant WHS and workers' compensation amendments were among the highlights of the first quarter of 2024. This major report covers all jurisdictions and looks at everything you need to know from the start of the year.
An employer has been found liable for a worker's Achilles injury and ordered to pay him damages, after it negligently failed to change the flat battery on a piece of powered mobile plant.
An employer's work system that required workers to step up onto a platform up to 80 times a day would have involved a breach of duty if an employee had been able to prove the system caused his injuries, a court has found in a case with a seizure and a fall.
Unclear wording, hard to navigate digital systems and time-consuming processes are preventing many workers from reporting safety concerns, near misses and incidents, a landmark Australian study has found.
A second duty holder has been fined over the death of an 80-year-old workplace visitor in a disused stairwell that posed an obvious risk of falling or entrapment, while a business has been fined over a fatality that followed its failure to identify the qualifications and competencies required for high-risk tasks.