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The front page and the section pages show what is current. This page lists everything we have published, so a story stays findable after it stops being news.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia consulted on six options to improve quad bike safety at work, and commissioned EY to cost the four regulatory ones. Helmets return $4.09 per dollar and an age limit $4.20. Requiring operator protective devices on every workplace quad bike returns $0.64, the only negative result, because of the cost of retrofitting the existing fleet.
Law + guidance
Part 3.1 of the model WHS Regulations, the hierarchy of control, only binds a PCBU that has an express duty under the Regulations. Welding has no such duty, so it gets there sideways through hazardous chemicals. Safe Work Australia has proposed six welding-specific regulations to close that gap, and two of them move recommendations out of the Code and into law.
Enforcement
In July we measured six SafeWork NSW conviction announcements and found none took less than three years from incident to announcement. We have now done the same for the four announced in August 2026. Two took less than three years, the fastest 1,031 days. The tight Industrial Court cluster we flagged for testing did not hold, but across all ten cases the two courts still do not overlap.
Law + guidance
WHS ministers asked Safe Work Australia to consult on a new duty in the model WHS Act for crowd platform operators. Fourteen submissions are published. Everything turns on one question of fact, how much control a platform has, and the consultation paper answers it twice, differently.
Law + guidance
From 1 July 2026, section 26A of the NSW WHS Act makes approved codes of practice the minimum performance standard a PCBU must meet. Everywhere else in Australia a code is admissible evidence and nothing more. The practical consequence is a single word: in a code, 'should' is not a suggestion.
Law + guidance
The Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 got assent on 18 February 2026 and puts algorithms, AI, automation and online platforms inside the NSW WHS Act. Three provisions commenced. The duties and the union inspection power did not, and cannot start until a month after SafeWork NSW publishes guidelines.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia says it does not regulate or enforce the model WHS laws. Nothing binds anyone until a jurisdiction implements it as its own law, every jurisdiction except Victoria has, and even those that did made variations. Who to actually deal with.
Hazards + exposures
A confined space is defined by circumstances, not by how small the room is. The three-limb test in the WHS Regulations, why a trench is not one on collapse risk alone, why leaning your head in counts as entry, and why you need a permit before the risk assessment.
Hazards + exposures
At 1.5 metres a trench becomes high risk construction work needing a SWMS, and separately triggers a duty to secure the area and support every side by shoring, benching or battering. What excavation work covers, what it excludes, and why a slope that held yesterday is not evidence.
Law + guidance
Your weekly payments have a deadline in almost every scheme: 7 days in NSW and Victoria, 14 in WA and SA, 3 working days in the NT. Your medical bills mostly do not: nine of the twelve schemes set no time at all for paying them. From Safe Work Australia's 2025 comparison, Table 5.1.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia consulted on cutting the workplace exposure standard for aluminium welding fumes from 5 to 1 mg per cubic metre. Ten submissions were published. The Minerals Council of Australia and the Boating Industry Association opposed the change on evidence grounds, the AMWU and WorkSafe WA supported it, the WA mining chamber accepted it while saying the evidence did not support it, and Weld Australia wanted the aluminium limit deleted entirely. The reduction went ahead. We read all eight organisational submissions.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia has opened a national review of health and air monitoring for hazardous chemicals, running 10 August to 21 September 2026. It puts 11 issues and 26 options on the table, and says plainly that the rules are unclear enough to be depressing monitoring rates. Among the options: define significant risk, or delete it; and copy Western Australia, where the doctor sends the report to the regulator and reports go up.
Alerts + enforcement
The NSW Resources Regulator acknowledged a fatal incident at United Wambo Joint Venture Open Cut Mine in its weekly summary for the week ending 31 July 2026. A blast crew member was struck by a mobile processing unit. We could find no safety alert or investigation report on it as at 17 August 2026, which is normal and is also why the lessons are not yet available to anyone else.
Data + statistics
The NSW Resources Regulator publishes an incident count every week and nobody adds them up. We read all 29 editions published in 2026 to 7 August: 1,150 reportable incidents, a flat weekly average of 39.7, a range from 20 to 58, and 86 incidents actually described. That is one in thirteen.
Data + statistics
Safe Work Australia's WHS profile for sales and service workers, published 11 August 2026, finds body stressing at 40.8 per cent of serious claims against 36.5 per cent for all occupations. The more useful finding is underneath: retail and accommodation have a lower claim-to-injury ratio than other priority industries, and the profile sets out the reporting barriers behind it.
Data + statistics
Safe Work Australia's WHS profile of truck drivers: 430 deaths in ten years, a fatality rate of 22.6 per 100,000 against 1.5 for all occupations, and 63 per cent of fatal vehicle incidents involving a single vehicle. The next biggest killer is being struck by your own truck. What the profile says, and how old its numbers are.
Hazards + exposures
The national workplace exposure limit for welding fumes not otherwise classified is 1 mg per cubic metre, inhalable, cut from 5 by WHS ministers in January 2024 and unchanged on the new limit list. The metals in that fume carry their own limits and several are tighter: manganese is 0.02 mg per cubic metre respirable, fifty times stricter. Safe Work Australia also said in August 2026 it has no health monitoring guide for welding fumes and intends to write one.
Exposures
Remove a worker above 30 micrograms per decilitre, or 10 for a woman of reproductive capacity. Return them below 20, or 5. Those return figures were halved in March 2025. Safe Work Australia consulted on lowering the triggers again; submissions closed 11.59pm on 24 August 2026 and the outcome is now what to watch.
Data + statistics
Resources Safety and Health Queensland publishes serious accident and high potential incident frequency rates for individual mines and quarries. Across 1,637 site-years the median site works about 15,500 hours a year, and at that size a single serious accident becomes a rate of 65. At the largest site in the data the same one accident becomes 0.23.
Hazards + exposures
When workplace exposure limits take legal effect on 1 December 2026, 54 entries on the list will carry no number at all. They are flagged as non-threshold genotoxic carcinogens, meaning no safe airborne concentration has been identified. Twenty-four of them are hexavalent chromium species. Here is the full list.
Hazards + exposures
Ministers could not agree to tighter limits for benzene, silica and seven others, so the old standards carry over when workplace exposure limits take legal effect on 1 December 2026. Safe Work Australia has now published the database that will carry them. We queried it directly for all nine and read the approved records. All nine match.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia's 2025 comparison sets out income replacement in every Australian and New Zealand workers' compensation scheme. The full-rate period runs from 13 weeks in NSW and Victoria to 52 weeks in South Australia, and the weekly cap ranges from $2,423.60 to $3,919.40. Comcare applies no weekly cap at all.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia's 2025 comparison of every workers' compensation scheme sets out journey cover jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Comcare do not cover the trip to and from work. Queensland, the ACT, Seacare and New Zealand do. NSW applies a real and substantial connection test.
Hazards + exposures
From 1 December 2026 a workplace exposure limit of 0.01 mg/m3 applies to diesel particulate matter. Safe Work Australia published three guides on 30 July to prepare for it. Same date as the exposure-limit transition where ministers could not agree on nine chemicals, and the opposite outcome: this one is a new limit, not a carry-over.
Enforcement
Fenner Dunlop Australia Pty Ltd was convicted and fined $212,500 in the District Court of NSW on 31 July 2026 over a 13 February 2022 incident in which a worker was struck by metal debris on a bucket elevator conveyor. It pleaded guilty under section 32 of the WHS Act. The regulator's message was the one it has used all month: the controls are well known.
Enforcement
We read every SafeWork NSW conviction release published between 15 and 31 July 2026 and pulled the incident date out of each. Median time from incident to announcement: 1,231 days. The shortest was 1,177 days. The two District Court matters ran about 400 days longer than the four Industrial Court ones.
Data
Australia's most recent official mining death toll is 10, for the 2024 calendar year: the highest since 2015 and 39 per cent above the five-year average. There is no published count for 2026. The ten-year series, and what each regulator does and does not publish.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia published AI and digital technologies guidance on 23 July 2026. It sits in the A-Z hazards library alongside noise and chemicals, and it says the trigger includes routine IT changes and updates pushed by software providers. The named risks are work intensification, surveillance scope creep, and workers held responsible for AI outputs they cannot control.
Hazards + exposures
In March 2026 Safe Work Australia published its model Code of Practice on managing biological hazards at work: viruses, bacteria, parasites, mould, allergens and toxins. Its central point is scope. It applies to any workplace where a worker could be exposed, from a research lab to a retail counter, and it treats the cold and the flu brought in from the community as hazards a business must manage. What the code covers and what it asks of a PCBU.
Data + statistics
The NSW Resources Regulator's weekly incident summary for the week ending 17 July 2026 records 38 reportable incidents and details three, all dangerous incidents: a drill rig boom striking a light vehicle at an underground intersection, a dozer and a haul truck reversing toward each other on a dark, dusty ramp, and a light vehicle catching fire underground after a snapped sensor leaked oil onto a hot brake unit. No worker was reported hurt in the three, a contrast with the week before, but the thread runs straight through two of them: mobile plant moving where no one meant it to.
Hazards + exposures
On a construction, civil, earthmoving or resources site the thing most likely to run a worker over is the plant already there. Safe Work Australia's general traffic guide and the plant regulations put the first control not on hi-vis but on distance: keep people and moving plant apart, plan the reversing, and write the traffic management plan down. The separation-first hierarchy, the reversing controls, and what the plan must contain.
Law + guidance
On 13 July 2026 Safe Work Australia opened a national consultation on Part 7.2 of the model WHS Regulations, the lead regulations, saying they may not be adequately protecting workers. It closed on 24 August 2026. The consultation paper put three changes on the table, including a lower blood lead threshold and health monitoring for every lead worker.
Hazards + exposures
In National Farm Safety Week, WorkSafe Victoria counts 39 agriculture deaths since 2021 and eight fatal tractor incidents since the start of 2025. The single most effective protection, a rollover bar and a seatbelt, is already a legal requirement on wheeled tractors, with narrow exemptions. Where the gap is.
Data + statistics
The NSW Resources Regulator's weekly incident summary for the week ending 10 July 2026 records 37 reportable incidents and details three: a conveyor belt rubbing to ignition, a tyre fitter who fractured vertebrae when a tyre fell across his legs, and a work platform on a loader that crowded down in an unplanned fashion and threw two workers, both hospitalised. After a fortnight of injury-free near-misses, the common thread is control of moving plant and loads.
Enforcement
On 14 and 15 July 2026 the Industrial Court of NSW fined three companies a combined $270,000, each over one of the hazards SafeWork NSW had named a 2026-27 enforcement priority two weeks earlier. The regulator's line each time: the controls are well known.
Enforcement
Between May and July 2026 the Office of the Work Health and Safety Prosecutor secured a run of Queensland convictions: a $310,000 fine over a coal mine worker's death, a coal-mining cluster, and a string of falls-from-height cases. Every outcome is a published court report, with the penalties charted and the national risk pattern behind them.
Law + guidance
Safety information only complies if it lands. Regulation 39(3) of the model WHS Regulations requires information, training and instruction to be provided in a way that is readily understandable by any person to whom it is provided, which is the legal hook for multilingual workforces, varied literacy, and young and new workers. What the consultation code and Safe Work Australia's November 2024 guidance ask employers to actually do.
Law + guidance
Regulation 43 requires every PCBU to prepare, maintain, test and implement an emergency plan, and the duty is all-hazards: fire, chemical release, natural disaster, bomb threats, violence and medical emergencies. What the plan must provide for, who coordinates it in a shared building, and why an unrehearsed plan falls short.
Law + guidance
Regulation 42 requires first aid equipment, facilities and an adequate number of trained first aiders, and leaves 'adequate' to a four-factor assessment. The first aid code's answer: one first aider per 50 workers in low risk workplaces, one per 25 in high risk, one per 10 in remote high risk, a kit every worker can reach, and a first aid room once a site passes 200 workers, or 100 in high risk.
Hazards + exposures
Machinery operators and drivers accounted for 32 per cent of worker deaths in 2024 at more than five times the overall fatality rate. What the plant code and Part 5.1 of the model WHS Regulations require: the fixed guarding order, isolation before maintenance, powered mobile plant controls, and the plant that must be registered before use.
Data + statistics
The NSW Resources Regulator's weekly incident summary for the week ending 3 July 2026 records 31 reportable incidents and details three, an excavator superstructure separating at its slew ring bearing, a 1.5-metre rock shearing a walkway off an excavator, and a haul truck reversing into a dozer, all without injury, and each returned to industry as specific published advice.
Law + guidance
Worker consultation under the model WHS Act is a duty with machinery: section 48's four requirements, elected health and safety representatives with a five-day training entitlement, provisional improvement notices, the right to direct unsafe work to cease, and a committee the PCBU must form within two months of a request by five workers. Every operative section, quoted.
Hazards + exposures
Regulation 36 puts personal protective equipment last in the hierarchy of controls, and regulations 44 to 47 spell out the duties it triggers: provide it, select it for fit and compatibility, maintain it, train workers in it and ensure it is used. The worker never pays: section 273 bans any charge or levy. Why a PPE-first safety program is a warning sign.
Hazards + exposures
Remote or isolated work is one of the few hazards with its own regulation: regulation 48 requires a PCBU to manage the risks and to provide a system of work that includes effective communication with the worker. Isolation in law is about access to help, not kilometres: the night cleaner, the community nurse, the long-distance driver and the worker at home are all inside the duty. The assessment factors, the buddy-system and movement-record controls, the psychosocial half, and the working-from-home scope.
Hazards + exposures
Vehicle incidents killed 79 workers in 2024, 42 per cent of all worker fatalities, and at least one vehicle was involved in two-thirds of them. The model WHS Act's definition of a workplace includes a vehicle, so the PCBU duty rides along: the risk-management framework, the September 2025 fatigue code's driving passages, the Heavy Vehicle National Law's parallel chain of responsibility, and the delivery riders the duty now reaches.
Hazards + exposures
Work-related contact dermatitis produced 480 skin-disease claims in 2023-24, 0.3 per cent of the total, and the research Safe Work Australia publishes alongside its guidance says compensation data badly undercounts the disease. The dermal route in the chemicals framework: the Sk skin notation, the two-hour wet-work definitions, the hierarchy that puts substitution before gloves, the glove paradox, and the Schedule 14 chemicals where skin checks are regulation.
Hazards + exposures
Falls, trips and slips produced 32,000 serious claims in 2023-24, 21.8 per cent of the national total, and 68.3 per cent of them happened on the same level. The duty that answers the most ordinary injury mechanism in Australian work: regulation 40's floors, lighting and layout requirements, the work environment code's inspection and housekeeping rules, and the control hierarchy that puts footwear last.
Safety alert
WorkSafe Queensland's 7 July 2026 safety alert covers tractor-mounted post drivers and similar mast-type attachments that detach or pivot without warning, after a farmer was fatally struck by a falling mast in April 2024. The four failure modes, the design rule that no single component should hold the mast, and the pre-start checks that find a failure before it happens.
Hazards + exposures
Being hit by a moving object produced 23,400 serious claims in 2023-24, and the transport, postal and warehousing industry recorded the most worker deaths of any sector in 2024. What the warehouse traffic guide, the plant regulations and the forklift licence actually require: pedestrian separation first, a documented traffic management plan, and written evidence of an LF or LO licence sighted before anyone drives.
Hazards + exposures
Australia's workplace exposure standards become workplace exposure limits on 1 December 2026, most of them tightened to health-based levels. For nine chemicals, including respirable crystalline silica, benzene and formaldehyde, WHS ministers have not reached a majority: the current numbers carry over unchanged, and Safe Work Australia's own analysis says they are not health-based.
Hazards + exposures
The model hazardous chemicals code sets a quantity ladder for every chemical store: correct GHS labels, a current SDS and a register at any amount, placards at the Schedule 11 threshold, and a manifest plus an emergency plan lodged with the fire brigade above the manifest quantity. The thresholds, litre by litre.
Law + guidance
Construction accounted for 37 of Australia's 188 worker deaths in 2024, one in five. The WHS Regulations answer with 18 named high-risk construction work activities, each needing a safe work method statement before work starts, and a $250,000 line that creates a construction project, a principal contractor and a WHS management plan. What each instrument requires, cited to the primary documents.
Hazards + exposures
Australia has no single lockout-tagout regulation. The duty is assembled from the model electrical risks code (test for dead before you touch, regs 154 to 157) and the plant code's eight-step lock-out process. What each requires, who may do electrical work, and the test-and-tag and RCD duties that sit alongside.
Hazards + exposures
Prolonged sitting at a workstation is the model manual tasks code's own example of a hazardous posture, and regulation 60 makes managing it a duty. What a compliant workstation looks like, the sedentary-work numbers in Safe Work Australia's guidance, and why desk claims are the rarest in the data and among the longest.
Hazards + exposures
The National Construction Code builds fire safety into hotels, schools and shopping centres; WHS regulation 43 makes getting people out the employer's job. What the December 2025 work environment code requires an emergency plan to contain, who coordinates it in a shared building, and the 12-month drill benchmark.
Law + guidance
A real WHS audit is mostly not paperwork: Comcare's national audit tool runs 108 criteria across five elements, and 79 of them test whether the system is actually used. Where gap analysis fits, what AS/NZS ISO 45001:2018 is and is not, and the officer duty that makes verification a legal obligation.
Law + guidance
Under the WHS Acts a gig rider and a labour-hire worker are already workers, and the platform, the food outlet, the agency and the host are already PCBUs holding the full safety duty. The shared-duty rules, the August 2024 gig reforms that deliberately left WHS alone, and the workers' compensation gap the October 2025 national policy approach is trying to close.
Hazards + exposures
There is no legal maximum working temperature in Australia: Safe Work Australia answers the stop-work question with a flat No, and there is no heat code of practice either. The duty comes from section 19, regulation 40's extremes-of-heat-or-cold requirement, the work environment code and Safe Work Australia's heat guide. What each one requires, the heatwave risk the guide names, and who can lawfully stop hot work.
Hazards + exposures
Noise is the rare hazard with a legal exposure standard written into the WHS Regulations: 85 dB(A) averaged over eight hours, 140 dB(C) peak. Every 3 decibels of extra level halves the allowed time. What the November 2024 noise code requires, the audiometric testing duty most employers miss, and why hearing loss barely shows in the claims data.
Law + guidance
Australia's return-to-work rate fell to 88.9 per cent in 2025 and has been sliding since 2014. The 2025 national survey's clearest signal: workers with a written return-to-work plan got back to work at 94 per cent, without one at 81.7. The scheme duties behind that plan, the return-to-work coordinator role, and why early intervention is measurable, cited to the primary documents.
Law + guidance
A WHS management system is a set of policies, procedures and plans, and the law already demands its working parts: officers must verify under s27, workers must be consulted under s47. And safety culture is not a slogan: the model WHS law defines corporate culture, and a culture that tolerated a breach can carry the company's fault.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia's September 2025 model Code of Practice turns twelve years of fatigue guidance into code-of-practice weight: no more than three successive night shifts, at least 12 hours between shifts, a break every five hours. What shift-working duty holders now have to show.
Law + guidance
WHS training in Australia is a legal architecture, not a course catalogue: section 19's duty to provide information, training, instruction and supervision, regulation 39's suitability test, the white card at construction's door, and 29 classes of work that need a high risk work licence. Who must hold what, and what a PCBU must sight.
Hazards + exposures
The falls duty applies to any fall from one level to another that is reasonably likely to cause injury. There is no 2 metre threshold. What regulations 78 to 80 and the falls code actually require: ground first, then fall prevention, then work positioning, then fall arrest, and a tested rescue plan whenever a harness is the control.
Law + guidance
Healthcare and social assistance is Australia's largest industry and its largest source of serious injury claims, at 19.9 per cent of the national total. In July 2025 it got its first consolidated WHS code of practice, and aged care is named throughout. What the code requires of providers.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia's December 2025 review says the engineered stone ban is working as intended, and then lists six things still broken: no agreed test for what counts as engineered stone, unverified silica-free claims, and a legacy benchtop reinstallation gap.
Law + guidance
Every Australian WHS jurisdiction now has an industrial manslaughter offence. They commenced across a 20-year span, the maximum penalties differ everywhere, and the model penalty was just re-indexed to $21.274 million. The full table, cited to each regulator.
Data + statistics
Body stressing caused 50,600 serious claims in 2023-24, the most common injury mechanism in every major occupation group. The Hazardous Manual Tasks code defines exactly four risk factors, and none of them is a lifting weight limit. What the data and the code actually require.
Law + guidance
In December 2025 the model WHS Act's notification rules were expanded to cover violent incidents, extended worker absences and work-related suicide. No jurisdiction has adopted the change yet. What is notifiable now, what is coming, and what a working reporting loop looks like.
Hazards + exposures
Mental health claims are up 161 per cent in a decade and now cost a median $67,400 each. The model code of practice that answers them has been in force since 2022, names 14 hazards, and gives officers a six-point due diligence checklist. What a duty holder actually has to do.
Data + statistics
The $61.8 billion cost-of-injury figure still circulating in board papers is from 2012-13, and the series that produced it ended there. The current, dated numbers: 188 deaths in 2024, 146,700 serious claims, a $28.6 billion a year GDP estimate, and the 22 per cent of claims that drive 75 per cent of the payments.
Law + guidance
Who holds a WHS duty, under which Act, in which state: the plain-English map. PCBUs, officers and workers, what codes of practice legally are, why Victoria is different, and the review of the model laws about to land on ministers' desks.