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.
An injured worker has failed in his appeal for damages, unsuccessfully contending his employer had a duty to warn him to keep his hands free so he could use a handrail on a set of "inherently dangerous" steps.
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.
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.
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 COVID-19 vaccine mandate for frontline workers has been found to be unlawful, after a superior court heard the decision-maker did not attempt to quantify the supposed safety and productivity benefits of the mandate, or the consequences of not imposing one.
A major supermarket did not breach its safety duty of care to a store manager, who allegedly suffered an overuse injury, by failing to prevent her from working "excessive" hours in the lead up to a major audit, a court has found.
