Browsing: Authority/inspectorate (QLD) | Page 1

A WHS prosecutor has successfully argued that the failure of workers to abide by safety procedures should not have influenced a sentencing magistrate to impose a low penalty in a case involving a six-metre fall.

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.

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.

• WHS regulator to enforce anti-smoking clauses;
  
• Regulator sends exclusion-zone warning with animated recreation;
  
• New WHS Code of Practice adopted by Tas; and
  
• Body-worn cameras adopted permanently for NT inspectors.

• Man originally charged with recklessness gets category-2 fine;
  
• New injury laws start soon in WA, supporting regulations released; and
  
• WHS rules for workplace quad bikes made in Qld.

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.

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 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".

A PCBU has been fined over a fatality that was caused, in part, by the inadvertent activation of a body-worn remote control for a machine.