Our guide to WHS in gig and labour-hire work sets out the general position: the model WHS Act was written to reach a worker whatever the contract says, because the primary duty attaches to work, not to employment. This page is about the one arrangement where Safe Work Australia now says that reach is uncertain, and about what the people who would carry the new duty said when asked.

What is actually proposed

The consultation paper is narrow and worth reading as written. It does not propose to change the primary duty. It asks whether a separate duty should be added to the model WHS Act, modelled on section 19, requiring a crowd platform operator to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers using the platform and of others affected by the work it facilitates. The paper is explicit about where the request came from: WHS ministers have asked Safe Work Australia to consult on a potential new duty, which would aim to ensure crowd platform workers receive the same levels of protection from harm to their health and safety as other workers.

The distinction the paper draws, and the one that decides who is in scope, is between on-demand platforms and crowd platforms. On-demand platforms allocate work algorithmically, top down: food delivery is the familiar case, and the paper states flatly that their operators already have duties to these workers as a PCBU under the model WHS laws. Crowd platforms are the horizontal kind, where an end-user posts a task, workers bid, and the two sides settle price and scope between themselves. Care and support work booked directly by a household is the Australian example that matters most.

On the current law the paper is candid that the answer is unclear: there is a lack of clarity on whether or not the various participants involved in crowd platform work are PCBUs, such as end-users who may be individuals engaging workers for personal or domestic jobs. That uncertainty is the gap the duty is meant to close.

The sentence the whole argument turns on

Here is the difficulty, and it is in the paper rather than in anyone’s submission. In section 3, defining what a crowd platform is, the paper says the operator is primarily an intermediary or matchmaker that connects workers and end-users, and that the crowd platform does not usually directly assign a specific task, or determine how and when it is performed.

Nine pages later, making the case for the duty, it says operators may be best placed to ensure a safe number of workers are assigned to the work, that workers are appropriately trained, and that workers are not required to work unreasonable hours that pose a WHS risk.

Those two passages describe different businesses. A body that does not assign the task or set the timing is not obviously the body best placed to control how many people do it and for how long. The paper hedges the second with a new duty would only apply so far as is reasonably practicable, and to the extent the crowd platform operator influences and directs the work, which is a real qualifier and does much of the work. But the underlying factual question is left open, and it is the question every submission answers. That reading is ours; the two quotations above are the paper’s own, and readers can check both against the document, which we link below.

The employers: no evidence, and no control to exercise

The Australian Industry Group made the contradiction its central point, and named it directly. Its submission argues it cannot see how it would be reasonably practicable for operators to control the risks, primarily because they do not influence or direct such work, and says of the paper’s best-placed passage that These assertions seem to be in direct conflict with the definition of crowd platforms on page 7. On working hours it is blunter still, calling it naïve to suggest that individual crowd platform operators have control over the hours someone will work, on the ground that a worker may take jobs through several platforms at once. Ai Group also says the definitions the duty would rest on are not yet settled enough to judge its scope.

The Housing Industry Association made an evidentiary argument rather than a jurisdictional one. It accepts the nature of work is changing but says none of these conditions point to a specific safety issue, or any shortcoming of the Model Act, and that the paper offers no data showing crowd platform use is a causal or contributory factor in workplace safety incidents. Its reading of the PCBU ambiguity is that the terms are misunderstood rather than deficient.

The platform: the worker is the PCBU

The most direct answer came from a business the duty would cover. Mable Technologies runs a care and support marketplace, and describes its own scale in the submission: more than 23,000 independent contractors providing services to over 30,000 older people and people with disability.

Mable’s position is that its contractors have high bargaining power, high authority over work and earn income on average above their employed counterparts, and that they should therefore be treated like the majority of NDIS independent contractors who use no platform at all and hold the responsibility for managing their own safety in the workplace. On that reading the individual contractor is the PCBU and the platform’s role is to help them meet that obligation, which Mable suggests could be done through a simple non-binding policy document.

It went further on the case for reform itself, saying that across the years Safe Work Australia has been examining the question it is still to hear of a single instance of harm which necessitates a regulatory intervention, and that absent identified harms the agency should indefinitely postpone this workstream. That is the strongest statement against the proposal in the published set, and it comes from the operator with the most workers on an Australian crowd platform.

The other side: control is exercised, just not by assigning tasks

The submissions supporting a duty do not dispute that a crowd platform avoids allocating work. They argue that allocation is the wrong place to look for control.

The Centre for Future Work, which has published research on platform care work, says platforms can and do exercise significant control over contracted care and support workers providing home-based care and support, and over the organisation, tasks and performance of their work, and identifies the mechanism as power over access to clients and jobs. It lists the levers as rating and ranking systems, surveillance of client-worker communications, terms of service and fees, and reports research finding pressure toward client satisfaction that can mean working unsafely.

The ACTU frames the duty the same way, arguing it should be based on the degree of influence and control, not the employment status or contractual arrangement of the worker, should apply so far as is reasonably practicable, and should sit alongside existing duties rather than replace them. Its warning is that without a statutory duty platforms will continue to externalise WHS risk onto those least able to manage it.

On why this sector rather than another, the ACTU cites Safe Work Australia’s own injury data: nursing and support and personal care workers at 38 serious workers’ compensation claims per million hours worked and aged and disability carers at 12.9, against a national benchmark of 6.8. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation strongly supports the introduction of a specific duty for crowd platform operators in the model WHS Act on the same proportionality principle, and points at rating systems as a pressure on workers who try to enforce limits. The Australian Services Union endorsed the ACTU submission and added that platforms take a share of what workers charge while workers work alone.

Cancer Council Australia supported the duty and raised the enforcement question nobody else did: how a national duty would be enforced against operators that are offshore or operate across jurisdictions, and how it would interact with a worker’s own PCBU obligations when they are an independent contractor.

The regulator’s answer is the one to read twice

SafeWork NSW is the largest state regulator and would be among those enforcing any new duty. Its submission is the most consequential in the set, and it lands between the two camps rather than in either.

It says the existing framework can in principle apply to crowd platforms, naming the provisions that would do the work: the primary duty, the reasonably practicable test, the duties on management or control of workplaces and systems of work, and the consultation requirement. Its objection is practical, that application is not always clear or consistent in practice.

On that basis SafeWork NSW supports, in principle, the introduction of a targeted duty for crowd platform operators within the model WHS framework, subject to it being clear, practical and applicable consistently across different platform arrangements. And it draws a line the paper did not: SafeWork NSW does not support amending the primary duty of care or existing core definitions within the WHS model framework.

That is the shape of a workable outcome, and it is worth noticing that it is available without resolving the control argument at all. A targeted duty scoped to influence leaves section 19 untouched, which is what the employer submissions are most concerned to protect, while giving the regulator something to enforce, which is what the worker submissions are asking for. New South Wales has already moved in that direction on its own: SafeWork NSW’s submission points to amendments made through the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026 (NSW), on the basis that digital systems shape how work is allocated, performed and monitored.

Where the fourteen sit

Ten of the fourteen published submissions support a new duty in some form, three oppose it or say the case is not made, and one raises practical questions without taking a position. Among the individual and smaller responses, one anonymous respondent supported a duty proportionate to influence and asked that fatigue, unreasonable scheduling and algorithm-driven work pressure be named in it. Another observed that a platform controls how much a worker is told before accepting a job, giving the example that a task listing may have no field for hazards even though the person posting it knows them. A safety consultancy, hsedirect.com.au, went furthest on remedies: it proposed amending the model Act to deem operators PCBUs, extending workers’ compensation to platform workers by default where no other cover exists, a code of practice for digital labour platforms, a voluntary platform accreditation scheme run by Safe Work Australia, and mandatory hazard disclosure by end-users when posting a task, enforced through platform terms of service. That last idea is the only one in the set that puts an obligation on the household doing the hiring.

The split is not employer against union in any simple way, because the regulator sits with the supporters and because the strongest opposition came from a platform rather than from a peak body. It is a disagreement about a fact, and it is testable: whether a rating system, a ranking algorithm, a fee structure and control of access to clients amount to influencing and directing work. Nothing in the published set resolves it, and the paper that framed the question took both positions.

What a duty holder should take from this now

Nothing has changed in the law. The consultation closed on 1 June 2026 after being extended from an original close of 24 April, and the paper says only that responses will inform more detailed work, including further consultation where needed. There is no announced date for advice to WHS ministers, and any change to the model WHS Act would then have to be implemented separately by each jurisdiction before it bound anyone.

The practical point is not the proposal, it is the uncertainty the proposal was created to fix, which exists today. If you engage workers through a crowd platform, or you are a worker on one, the question of who holds the duty is currently unsettled on Safe Work Australia’s own account. The safe reading of the model WHS Act is the one that has always applied: duties are not transferable, more than one person can hold the same duty at the same time, and a business that influences or directs work does not escape a duty by describing itself as an intermediary. An arrangement built on the assumption that the contractor carries all of it is exposed if the answer lands the other way, and it is exposed now rather than when a duty commences.