Section
The model WHS Acts, Regulations and codes of practice tracked as they move: what changed, who it binds and from when, each cited to the primary instrument.
Law + guidance
Draft 2026 editions of AS 3640 and AS 2985, the dust sampling methods Safe Work Australia's exposure guidance names, close on 11 November. Six other safety drafts are open, the last closing 9 December.
Law + guidance
Item 47 of the Seacare list pointed to item 38, seven agents for a fibrotic lung disease with five years’ work. From 11 September 2026 it points to item 41’s 42 chemicals with no minimum period. How the error arose, and five agents the fix drops.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia asked one closed question and 34 answers are now on the record: 19 for new welding-specific regulations, 15 for updating the code instead. Among the 15 named organisations it reverses, 8 to 7. SafeWork NSW and WorkSafe WA both chose the code, each supports exactly one of the six proposals, and it is a different one.
Law + guidance
Person conducting a business or undertaking is what Australian WHS law hangs its primary duty on, and we had used the term on most of this masthead without defining it. Section 5 in full: the two-limb test, the reach into partnerships, and the four carve-outs, including a volunteer-association exemption that ends as soon as the group employs one person.
Law + guidance
The qualifying periods are near-identical nationally: brain cancer and leukaemia at five years, bladder and kidney at fifteen. Whether a volunteer is covered is not. Tasmania, Queensland, Victoria and the NT include them; WA, SA, the ACT and Comcare say employed firefighters.
Law + guidance
South Australia gives the injured worker 24 hours and their employer five business days. Victoria gives 30 days. New Zealand allows 12 months. Queensland and Western Australia impose no worker notification duty at all. Table 4.2, read scheme by scheme.
Law + guidance
One national product standard, three different workplace regimes. Helmets and passenger limits are regulated in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, a minimum rider age only in Queensland, and everywhere else the obligation is the general duty plus guidance. From Safe Work Australia's own consultation evidence.
Law + guidance
Australian Standards are written in the open, and the stage where an outsider can actually change one is public comment. On 29 August Standards Australia listed 15 drafts open. Six closed on 31 August 2026, a Monday, and among them were both parts of the microbial-control standard for building air-handling and water systems, and the hazardous-areas part of the coal-mine electrical equipment standard. Nobody publishes this list as a safety list, so here it is.
Law + guidance
Fair Work Act section 130 switches leave off while you are receiving compensation. Queensland, WA, the ACT and Tasmania legislate past it, the Northern Territory scheme is silent so the federal rule stands, and the Commonwealth schemes prohibit paid leave other than maternity leave. Table 5.10, read scheme by scheme.
Law + guidance
Part 3.1 binds only a PCBU with an express duty under the Regulations, and welding has none, so it reaches the hierarchy of control sideways through hazardous chemicals. Six welding-specific regulations are proposed; the first simply makes Part 3.1 apply.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia had EY cost four proposed quad bike rules over ten years. Helmets return $4.09 per dollar and a minimum age $4.20. Requiring operator protective devices on every workplace machine returns $0.64, and the reason is the fleet already on farms, not the devices.
Law + guidance
The Digital Work Systems Act got assent on 18 February 2026 and puts algorithms, AI, automation and online platforms inside the NSW WHS Act. Three provisions commenced, and they are the ones that let SafeWork NSW write a guideline. The duties and the union inspection power cannot start until a month after that guideline is published.
Law + guidance
WHS ministers asked whether the model WHS Act should carry a new duty for crowd platform operators. Fourteen submissions are published, and they turn on one question of fact: how much control a platform has over the work. The consultation paper answers it twice, differently.
Law + guidance
Section 26A commenced 1 July 2026, making approved codes the minimum standard a PCBU is expected to meet rather than admissible evidence. The word to re-read is ‘should’: in a code it is the standard, and the only lawful alternative is one you can show is equivalent or higher.
Law + guidance
It says so itself: it maintains the model WHS laws but does not regulate or enforce them. Nothing binds until a jurisdiction implements it, every jurisdiction except Victoria has, and most made variations. Who to actually deal with.
Law + guidance
When you cannot work and the rent is due, the question is not what percentage of your wage the scheme pays. It is when the first payment lands. Safe Work Australia’s 2025 comparison sets that out scheme by scheme, and the answer is reassuringly specific: 7 days in New South Wales and Victoria, 14 in Western Australia and South Australia, 3 working days in the Northern Territory. Then there is the other half of the table, which nobody quotes. For paying your medical bills, nine of the twelve schemes specify no time at all.
Law + guidance
Ten submissions to Safe Work Australia's consultation, eight of them read in full. The split is not the striking part: nearly every side began from the same admission that the science could not settle the number, and reached opposite conclusions from it.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia ran a review of health and air monitoring for every hazardous chemical, saying unclear requirements are holding monitoring rates down and that nobody knows how far. Eleven issues, 26 options, and the Western Australian rule where the doctor sends the report. Submissions closed on 21 September 2026.
Law + guidance
Almost every conversation about workers’ compensation fixes on one number: the percentage of your wage the scheme pays while you cannot work. It is the wrong number to fix on. Safe Work Australia’s 2025 comparison of every scheme in Australia and New Zealand sets out the detail, and the two figures that actually decide what lands in your account are how long you hold the top rate and what the weekly cap is. The first runs from 13 weeks to 52 weeks depending on the scheme. The second ranges from $2,423.60 a week to $3,919.40, and one scheme applies no weekly cap at all.
Law + guidance
Most people assume that if they are hurt travelling to or from work, the workers’ compensation scheme picks it up. For millions of Australians that is wrong. Safe Work Australia’s 2025 comparison of every scheme in Australia and New Zealand, published on 30 June, sets it out jurisdiction by jurisdiction: Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Comcare do not cover the ordinary journey between home and work. Queensland, the ACT, Seacare and New Zealand do. New South Wales applies a test.
Law + guidance
Safe Work Australia opened a national consultation on Part 7.2 of the model WHS Regulations, the lead regulations, conceding they may not be adequately protecting workers. The three changes it put on the table, including a lower blood lead threshold and health monitoring for every lead worker. Closed 24 August 2026.
Law + guidance
Part 5 of the model WHS Act is machinery, not sentiment: section 48's four requirements for real consultation, elected health and safety representatives with a five-day paid training entitlement, the eight-day provisional improvement notice, the cease-work direction, and a committee due within two months of a request by five workers.
Law + guidance
Regulation 39(3) requires safety information, training and instruction to be readily understandable by any person who receives it: the legal hook for multilingual workforces, varied literacy and young workers. The consultation code's literacy expectations, and the November 2024 national guidance on making the message land.
Law + guidance
Regulation 42 requires equipment, facilities and an "adequate number" of trained first aiders, scaled by the work, the hazards, the site and everyone on it. The kit rules, the annual CPR refresher, the 200-worker first aid room line, and the assessment that decides all of it.
Law + guidance
Regulation 43 requires one written plan providing for response, evacuation, notification, medical treatment and communication, built on the workplace's actual hazards: fire, chemical release, natural disaster, bomb threats, violence. The contents the law fixes, the 12-month drill benchmark, and who coordinates the plan in a shared building.
Law + guidance
Section 19 makes information, training, instruction and supervision one duty with four working parts, regulation 39 sets the suitability test, the white card guards construction's door, and Schedule 3 licenses 29 classes of high risk work. What a PCBU must sight before work starts.
Law + guidance
A safety management system is a loop, not a binder, and the law already demands its working parts: officers must verify under section 27, workers must be consulted under section 47. And the model Act defines corporate culture, making a culture that tolerated a breach one way to prove a company's fault.
Law + guidance
The 18 kinds of high-risk construction work that demand a safe work method statement before work starts, the $250,000 threshold that creates a principal contractor and a site-wide WHS management plan, and the fatality and claims numbers behind the machinery.
Law + guidance
The 2025 national survey found 88.9 per cent of injured workers got back to work, down from 91.6 in 2021; with a return-to-work plan the rate was 94.0 per cent, without one 81.7. The scheme duties, the coordinator role and the measurable case for early intervention.
Law + guidance
The WHS worker definition never asked how someone is engaged. Who owes what to gig and labour-hire workers, why shared duties cannot be contracted away, and the workers' compensation gap the October 2025 national policy approach is trying to close.
Law + guidance
Comcare's national audit tool puts 79 of its 108 criteria under implementation: whether the system is used, not whether it is written down. Where gap analysis fits, what ISO 45001 is and is not, and the officer duty that makes verification a legal obligation.
Law + guidance
Commencement dates from 2017 to 2024, maximum penalties from $10 million to life imprisonment, and a model penalty that re-indexed days ago. The table every multi-state duty holder needs, cited to each regulator.
Law + guidance
The December 2025 incident notification amendment expands what PCBUs must tell the regulator, once your jurisdiction adopts it. The current rules, the coming ones, and a live example of the reporting loop working.
Law + guidance
Two million workers, the worst claims record in the country, and a July 2025 code that says patient care never outranks worker safety. What aged care providers now have to show.
Law + guidance
Ten terms quoted from the WHS Act with their section numbers, what each definition leaves out, and the duty the Act never names: psychosocial hazards.
Law + guidance
What the SafeWork NSW licence register contains, in the regulator's own words, and the four questions it cannot answer. Including the suppression right, which means not finding someone is not evidence they are unlicensed.
Law + guidance
One model law, nine implementations, one holdout state. What a PCBU is, what officers owe, what codes of practice legally are, and what the Best Practice Review could change. The page the rest of this masthead links back to.