Suicide, violence and extended absences: what the model law now says you must report

What is notifiable today, everywhere

Under the current WHS Acts, a PCBU must notify the regulator immediately on becoming aware of a notifiable incident: a death, a "serious injury or illness" as defined (the list runs from amputations and head injuries to any injury requiring hospital admission), or a dangerous incident, an event that exposed someone to a serious risk even if nobody was hurt, such as a structural collapse, an uncontrolled electrical contact or a runaway vehicle. The dangerous incident category is the one small operators most often miss: the near miss with no injury is already legally reportable when the risk was serious, and the site must be preserved pending the regulator's advice. Safe Work Australia's incident notification pages set out the definitions.

What the December 2025 amendment adds

Notifiable events under the model WHS Act: the standing categories and the December 2025 additions. The additions bind nothing until a jurisdiction amends its own Act.

The direction of the change is the story. Every standing category is about physical events at a workplace. All three additions reach into psychosocial territory: violence, the long absences that usually mark serious psychological injury, and suicide connected to work. That tracks the claims data, where mental health conditions are the fastest growing serious-claim category, up 161 per cent in a decade, as covered in our psychosocial hazards story. Regulators cannot inspect what they never hear about, and the amendment is the model law wiring psychological harm into its alarm system.

On timing: model amendments take effect jurisdiction by jurisdiction, when each parliament amends its own Act. That is how every model change moves, and this one arrives while the broader Best Practice Review of the model laws is due to report to ministers in mid-2026, so jurisdictions may legislate it alongside whatever the review produces. The practical move for a safety manager now is to check whether your incident procedures could answer the new categories if they commenced next quarter: would your system even detect a four-week absence pattern, and who would make the notification call on a violent incident?

What a working reporting loop looks like

Near-miss reporting is usually written about as culture. It is easier to show. The NSW Resources Regulator publishes a weekly incident summary of what mines reported, reviewed each week by the Chief Inspector, with the latest edition (week ending 26 June 2026, at our check on 5 July) published within days of the events. A typical entry from that edition: at a construction materials mine, a reversing articulated truck backed into a parked one, damaging a handrail and bonnet, with neither operator injured. Nobody was hurt; it was reported anyway; and the regulator's published recommendation pointed industry to specific layers of its vehicle-interaction guidance, training and authority to operate on one hand, operator awareness technology on the other.

That is the full loop in one paragraph: a no-injury event, notified, pooled, analysed, and returned to every operator in the state as specific advice, within about a fortnight. It is also the standard a general-industry PCBU should hold their own internal system to. A near-miss report that ends in a filing cabinet is a cost; the loop only pays when reports come back out as changed controls, which is the same logic the model amendment applies at national scale.