Body stressing is still the way Australians get hurt at work: 50,600 serious claims last year

Where serious claims actually come from

Cut the same data by what the injury is rather than what caused it and the musculoskeletal picture gets bigger, not smaller: traumatic joint, ligament, muscle and tendon injuries are the largest nature-of-injury category at 53,300 serious claims (36.4 per cent), and musculoskeletal and connective tissue diseases add another 22,500 (15.3 per cent). Together, over half of all serious claims in Australia are musculoskeletal damage of one kind or another. The disease half of that ledger runs long and expensive: median 12.9 weeks lost and $24,300 compensation (2022-23 reference), against 7.4 weeks and $16,300 for the average claim.

Who is carrying it

Labourers account for 24.2 per cent of all serious claims at a frequency of 23.1 claims per million hours worked, more than three times the all-industry rate of 6.8. Community and personal service workers, the occupation group that includes aged care and disability support, are next at 21.9 per cent and a frequency of 15.3, which is one reason the healthcare and social assistance sector now has its own code with people-handling at its centre. Machinery operators and drivers follow at 12.1 claims per million hours.

What the code actually asks

The model Code of Practice for hazardous manual tasks (March 2020) does not set weight limits. It defines a hazardous manual task by the presence of any of four risk factors: high force, repetitive movement, sustained or awkward posture, and exposure to vibration, each with worked examples (gripping small instruments with high force counts; so does any body part held in an unnatural position). That definition is the compliance test: a task with none of the four is not a hazardous manual task, and a task with one of them is, regardless of how light the load is. The duty that follows is the standard cycle, identify the hazardous tasks, assess them, eliminate or minimise the risk so far as reasonably practicable with the hierarchy of controls, and review. The code's emphasis is on redesigning the task and the workplace layout before reaching for training, because technique training alone does not remove any of the four factors.

Reading the trend honestly

Serious claims nationally are up 34.5 per cent in raw count over the decade to 2023-24p, but the frequency rate rose only 12.6 per cent once hours worked are accounted for. Manual handling injury is not exploding; it is persisting, at enormous scale, in the same occupations, while attention has shifted to faster-growing categories. For the cost mathematics of that persistence, including why long claims dominate compensation spending, see the true cost of workplace injury.