Almost one in three workers killed in 2024 was a machinery operator or driver. Plant law starts with the guard.

Plant is almost everything, and the duty follows it

The code's definition of plant takes in "machinery, equipment, appliances, containers, implements and tools" and anything fitted or connected to them, with one carve-out: plant that relies exclusively on manual power and is designed to be primarily supported by hand, a screwdriver being the code's example, sits outside the regulations and under the general duty of care only. Everything else is inside. The person with management or control of plant at a workplace carries a block of specific duties in regulations 203 to 213: managing the risks, preventing unauthorised alterations or interference, using plant only for the purpose it was designed for unless a competent person has assessed that a different use does not increase risk, and having maintenance, inspection and any testing done by a competent person, in accordance with the manufacturer's recommendations, or a competent person's recommendations if the manufacturer left none, or at least annually for inspection if neither is reasonably practicable. Upstream, designers, manufacturers, importers and suppliers owe their own duties, including passing safety information down the chain to the end user, and a business that modifies its own plant collects the designer's and manufacturer's duties as well as its own. The code lists the harms that make plant "a major cause of work-related death and injury": limbs amputated by unguarded moving parts, workers crushed by mobile plant or quad bike rollovers, falls while accessing plant, electric shock, and burns.

Regulation 208 fixes the order of guards

Guarding is not a style choice. Where guarding is the control, regulation 208 sets a strict sequence. If access to the dangerous area is not needed during operation, maintenance or cleaning, the guard must be "a permanently fixed physical barrier". If access is needed, it must be "an interlocked physical barrier" that only opens when the area presents no risk. Only if neither is reasonably practicable may the guard be a physical barrier removable with tools, and only if that too is not reasonably practicable may a presence-sensing safeguarding system, a light curtain, laser scanner or pressure mat, do the job. Whatever level applies, the guarding must be of solid construction, securely mounted to resist impact, must make bypassing or disabling it "as difficult as is reasonably practicable", must not create a risk in itself, and must be properly maintained. Two practical rules follow. Where moving parts may break or eject workpieces, the guarding must control that risk too. And guards removed for maintenance must go back before normal operation, with the plant, so far as reasonably practicable, unable to restart until they do. The code adds the workshop wisdom the regulation implies: fix tool-removable guards with a special tool the operator does not carry, never wing nuts, and paint guards a single high-visibility colour with a contrasting colour behind them, so a missing guard announces itself.

Stopping, starting and the energy in between

The rest of the regulations 210 to 212 block is about control of the machine. Operator controls must be identified, conveniently placed, guarded against unintentional activation and "able to be locked into the 'off' position to enable disconnection from energy sources". Emergency stops must be prominent, immediately accessible, coloured red, immune to circuit malfunction, and on multi-operator plant of the stop-and-lock-off type, so the plant cannot restart until every activated stop is reset; the code is careful to add that an emergency stop is a back-up, never the primary control. Warning devices are mandatory where mobile plant could collide with pedestrians. Behind all of it sits isolation: the code's section 4.5 sets the eight-step lock-out process for maintenance, repair and cleaning, from shutting down through isolating every energy source, mains, batteries, solar, fuels, steam, pressurised fluids, springs and gravity, to locking out with one lock, tag and key per worker and testing by attempted restart. A tag "should not be used on its own as an isolation device; only a lock is effective in isolating the energy source". This masthead has covered the whole isolation discipline, including the electrical code's test-for-dead rule, on the electrical safety and isolation page. Plant not in use has its own duty: regulation 207 requires it left in a state that creates no risk, which the code translates as stored energy released, gravity-held parts lowered, and off-line machines isolated and locked out.

Powered mobile plant: the five listed risks

Forklifts, loaders, excavators and their relatives get their own regulations. Under regulations 214 and 215 the person with management or control of powered mobile plant must manage the risks of the plant overturning, things falling on the operator, the operator being ejected, the plant colliding with any person or thing, and mechanical failure of pressurised elements, and must ensure a suitable combination of operator protective devices is provided, maintained and used. Since 11 October 2021, the code notes, all new and imported second-hand general use quad bikes must be fitted with an operator protective device, which must not be removed unless replaced with equivalent or better rollover protection. The code devotes two sections to the unglamorous killer in this class, the roll-away: park on level ground, chock the wheels square to the tyre, turn wheels toward the kerb, handbrake on, engine off, keys out, attachments grounded, and never stand in the path of a vehicle that has started to roll. Operating much of this class is licensed work: a PCBU must sight written evidence of a high risk work licence before directing or allowing it, a rule covered in detail on the training and licensing page. Traffic management, the separation of mobile plant from people on foot, is the control the code points to first, because collisions appear on both the fatality and claims tables below.

The plant that must be registered before it runs

Schedule 5 of the regulations puts a short list of plant behind a registration gate, reproduced in the code's Appendix B. Plant designs requiring registration include pressure equipment, gas cylinders, tower cranes, lifts, escalators and moving walkways, building maintenance units, people-lifting hoists with platform travel over 2.4 metres, crane work boxes, amusement devices, concrete placing booms, prefabricated scaffolding, boom-type elevating work platforms, vehicle hoists, mast climbing work platforms and mobile cranes rated over 10 tonnes. A subset, boilers and pressure vessels at the higher hazard levels, tower cranes, lifts, building maintenance units, amusement devices, concrete placing booms and the big mobile cranes, must also be registered item by item: each individual machine inspected by a competent person, registered for five years, its number marked on the plant. A PCBU "must not direct or allow a worker to use a registrable item of plant in the workplace if it has not been registered", and altered designs that may affect health and safety trigger re-registration. Records follow the registrable plant: regulation 237 requires records of all tests, inspections, maintenance, commissioning and alterations for as long as the plant is used or controlled.

What the machines do, in the national data

Machinery operators and drivers recorded 61 worker fatalities in 2024, 32 per cent of the 188 national total and the highest count of any occupation group, at a fatality rate of 6.7 per 100,000 workers against 1.3 overall, which Safe Work Australia notes is more than five times the national rate. By mechanism, being hit by moving objects killed 17 workers (9 per cent), being hit by falling objects 7 per cent, and being trapped by moving machinery or equipment and being trapped between stationary and moving objects 5 per cent each. On the injury side, being hit by moving objects produced 23,400 serious workers' compensation claims in 2023-24, 16.0 per cent of the national total, with median time lost of 5.2 weeks and median compensation of $12,700, and the machinery operators and drivers occupation group lodged 18,300 serious claims with the longest median time lost of the top four claiming groups at 9.4 weeks. The pattern the guarding order exists to break is visible in the numbers: machines hurt the people who run them, and they hurt bystanders on foot, which is why the code treats guarding and traffic separation as the first controls, not the PPE that sits last in the hierarchy.