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Silica, asbestos, psychosocial risk and the exposure standards that govern them, reported as the duties the current codes actually impose and cited to the primary document.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia's 2026 survey: 68.0 per cent of all workers probably exposed to a hazard, 28.9 per cent at a high level. Silica reaches 71.8 per cent of construction workers and 35.7 per cent of apprentices and trainees.
Hazards + exposures
“Not otherwise classified” does not mean the fume left over once the named metals are counted. The report behind the 1 mg/m3 figure defines it as the total fume produced by welding, and says Australia rejected measuring constituents instead because the harmful ones are not known in their entirety.
Hazards + exposures
At that depth 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. Meeting one is not meeting the other.
Hazards + exposures
The definition turns on circumstances, not on how small the space is, so the same tank can qualify one day and not the next. A trench is not a confined space on collapse risk alone. Leaning your head in counts as entry, and you need a permit before the risk assessment that informs the permit.
Hazards + exposures
The approved national limit for welding fumes not otherwise classified is 1 mg per cubic metre inhalable, in force 1 December 2026. The metals inside that fume carry their own limits and manganese is fifty times stricter. Safe Work Australia has also said it has no health monitoring guide for welding fumes and intends to write one.
Hazards + exposures
A workplace exposure limit for diesel particulate matter applies from 1 December 2026, and Safe Work Australia published three guides on 30 July to prepare for it. Same date as the transition where nine contested chemicals kept their old numbers, and the opposite outcome. Mining, tunnelling, quarrying and vehicle maintenance are named.
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 rollover bar and seatbelt that would prevent most of it are already required on wheeled tractors, with narrow exemptions that point straight at the oldest machines.
Hazards + exposures
Fifty-four approved records carry no limit at all, every one flagged as a non-threshold genotoxic carcinogen. Twenty-four are hexavalent chromium species, the everyday output of stainless welding and chrome plating. The full list.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia has published the register that carries the limits taking legal effect on 1 December. We queried it for all nine chemicals ministers deadlocked on and read the approved record for each. All nine match, and the register adds the milligram equivalents, the size fractions, and the fact that copper is two entries.
Hazards + exposures
We reported in July that Safe Work Australia had opened a consultation on the lead regulations, conceding they may not be adequately protecting workers. What that piece did not give you was the arithmetic. Here it is. You must remove a worker from lead risk work once their blood lead exceeds 30 micrograms per decilitre, or 10 if she is of reproductive capacity. They may only return below 20, or 5. Those two return figures were halved in March 2025. The consultation now on the table would move the triggers again, and it closed at 11.59 pm AEST on Monday 24 August 2026.
Hazards + exposures
On 23 July 2026 Safe Work Australia published guidance on artificial intelligence and digital technologies, and filed it in the A-Z hazards library, next to noise and chemicals. The framing is deliberately unexciting: the process for managing these risks, it says, is the same as for any other workplace hazard. The detail is not unexciting at all. The guidance says the duty can be triggered by routine changes to IT systems, and by updates pushed by software providers, and it names the risks it expects: work intensification, surveillance scope creep, and workers held responsible for outputs they cannot control.
Hazards + exposures
Australia's exposure standards become workplace exposure limits on 1 December 2026, most of them newly health-based. Nine chemicals keep their old numbers, and the impact statement ministers were answering says those numbers are not health-based. The table of what stays and what was declined.
Hazards + exposures
Vehicle incidents killed 92 workers in 2025, 41 per cent of the total, yet produced under 5 per cent of serious claims. Section 8 defines a workplace to include a vehicle; the fatigue code's 17-hours-awake line, the HVNL chain of responsibility, and the delivery riders the duty now reaches.
Hazards + exposures
A cleaner alone in a city office at night is isolated in law. Regulation 48's risk duty and effective-communication requirement, the code's assessment factors and buddy-system controls, the psychosocial half of the hazard, and why the home office is already inside the duty.
Hazards + exposures
Contact dermatitis mostly takes hands and takes months to heal. The dermal route in the chemicals code, the Sk notation, wet work's two-hour rule, the hierarchy that puts substitution before gloves, and the Schedule 14 chemicals where weekly skin inspection is regulation.
Hazards + exposures
The open-site companion to the warehouse page: construction, civil, earthmoving and resources yards. The plant collision duty, the separation-first hierarchy, the reversing controls the mining incident summaries keep pointing at, and the traffic management plan a competent person has to write down.
Hazards + exposures
The warehouse traffic guide's first answer to forklifts is separation: overhead walkways, barriers, separate pedestrian doors, exclusion zones. The loading-dock choreography, the drive-off hardware, the traffic management plan, and the LF licence a PCBU must sight in writing before anyone drives.
Hazards + exposures
Falls, trips and slips produced 32,700 serious claims in 2024-25, and in the latest split, for 2023-24, 68.3 per cent were on the same level. Regulation 40's floor and lighting duties, the work environment code's inspection rule, the stair geometry in the slips fact sheet, and why a wet-floor sign is the second-weakest control.
Hazards + exposures
Plant covers the forklift and the power tool alike, and regulation 208 fixes the order of guards: permanently fixed, then interlocked, then tool-removable, then presence-sensing. The isolation rules, the powered mobile plant duties, and the plant that must be registered before use.
Hazards + exposures
Regulation 36 makes the hierarchy of controls law, with personal protective equipment the level of last resort. The provide, select, maintain, train and ensure-use duties in regulations 44 to 47, the fit and compatibility rules, and why the worker never pays for any of it.
Hazards + exposures
Regulation 78 covers any fall from one level to another that is reasonably likely to cause injury, and fixes the control order: ground first, then fall prevention, then work positioning, then fall arrest. The ladder rules, the rescue duty a harness creates, and the 28 deaths in the 2025 data.
Hazards + exposures
The exposure standard is regulation, not guidance: LAeq,8h 85 dB(A) and a 140 dB(C) peak. The dose table from the November 2024 code, the buy-quiet duties on designers, the audiometric testing rule, and why the most common permanent injury shows up as 190 claims a year.
Hazards + exposures
No heat code exists and no thermometer reading ends a shift by law. The duty assembles from section 19, regulation 40, the work environment code and the heat guide, and it covers heatwaves, indoor heat, the monitoring requirement and the right to cease unsafe work.
Hazards + exposures
The manual tasks code lists prolonged sitting at a workstation as a hazard in its own right, and regulation 60 makes managing it a duty. The workstation and seating rules, the 30-minute and 7-hour sedentary thresholds, and the claims table that says office injuries are rare but run long.
Hazards + exposures
The hazardous chemicals code arranges storage duties as a quantity ladder: GHS labels, 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.
Hazards + exposures
The electrical risks code prohibits energised work outside four narrow exceptions and requires testing for dead every time; the plant code sets the eight-step lock-out process for every other energy source. What each demands, and the records that prove it.
Hazards + exposures
The National Construction Code builds the exits; getting people to them is the employer's emergency plan under regulation 43. Who coordinates the plan in a shared building, the 12-month drill benchmark, and the two current NCC editions a national operator now straddles.
Hazards + exposures
The September 2025 model fatigue code names the roster patterns that create risk: more than three successive nights, less than 12 hours between shifts, less than 24 hours' notice. What it expects a shift-running PCBU to show, and what a roster agreement cannot sign away.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia's own review says the ban is working, and six things around it are not finished. What a duty holder still has to do about silica, benchtops and the products sold as safe.
Hazards + exposures
The 14 named psychosocial hazards, the officer due diligence checklist, and the claims data that says bullying and harassment, not work pressure, is the biggest driver.
Hazards + exposures
Safe Work Australia's March 2026 model code applies to any workplace where a worker could be exposed, and treats the cold and the flu carried in from the community as hazards to manage. What counts, who is most exposed, and the controls it asks for.