A $310,000 coal-mine death leads Queensland's mid-2026 workplace prosecutions

Queensland runs its work-health-and-safety prosecutions through a body separate from its regulator. WorkSafe Queensland investigates and issues alerts; the independent Office of the Work Health and Safety Prosecutor takes the matters to court and publishes the outcomes on a running court-reports register. Read across a season, that register is a map of how Australians are being hurt and killed at work, drawn not from campaigns but from what the courts actually accepted. Between late May and early July 2026 it recorded ten outcomes. They fall into a clear shape.

The death: $310,000, and a safety system that was not followed

The heaviest penalty of the period, by a distance, was for the worst outcome. On 23 June a mining contractor was sentenced in the Emerald Magistrates Court and fined $310,000 after a breach that caused the death of a coal mine worker. The charge was not a paperwork failure: it was a breach of the obligation to comply with the mine's own safety and health management system, under sections 34(b)(i) and 43(1)(b) of the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act 1999. Coal mines are among the most heavily systematised workplaces in the country precisely because the hazards are lethal; the finding here is that the system existed and the duty to work to it was not met. At $310,000 the fine is roughly three times the next-largest of the period, which is the register's own way of marking the difference between a risk exposed and a life lost.

The mining cluster

The death was not the register's only coal-mining matter. On 3 July a coal mine operator was fined $95,000 in the Mackay Magistrates Court over a dozer engulfment, for failing to keep the risk to workers at an acceptable level under the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act. On 18 June a coal mine supervisor was separately convicted in the Moranbah Magistrates Court under the same Act's obligations on individuals. Three coal-mining prosecutions in a single window is not background noise. Mining carried a worker-fatality rate of 3.4 per 100,000 in 2024, well above the 1.3 across all industries, and its ten deaths that year ran 39 per cent above its own five-year average, in Key WHS Statistics Australia 2025. The court list is the enforcement end of that same trend line.

The run of falls

The rest of the period is dominated by one mechanism. A solar installation company was fined $105,000 in the Beenleigh Magistrates Court on 18 June after workers fell from a roof; a company that connected subcontractors with small handyman-type jobs drew $90,000 on 22 May for exposing a contractor to a fall-from-heights risk; and an air-conditioning business was fined $85,000 on 26 June for a single Category 2 offence after a fall from height. Falls from a height were the second-most-common cause of Australian worker deaths in 2024, 13 per cent of the total, or 24 lives, behind only vehicle incidents, in the same national dataset. The prosecutions track the harm: roofs, solar arrays and elevated work are where the falls happen, and where the duty to provide edge protection, harnessing or a safer method of work is most often found wanting.

Electrical duties bite too, and so do a worker's

Two outcomes sit outside those groups and are worth their own line. On 16 June a small roofing company was fined $80,000 in the Dalby Magistrates Court after a worker received an electric shock from an overhead powerline, charged not under the Work Health and Safety Act but under section 40C of the Electrical Safety Act 2002, a reminder that overhead-line contact near roofs carries its own primary duty. And the register's duties do not stop at the employer: on 26 June two workers were themselves fined $12,000 and $9,000 over a storage-rack collapse, for failing the duty every worker carries to take reasonable care that their own acts do not put others at risk. The newest entry, on 6 July, a $90,000 fine after an apprentice suffered the near-complete loss of vision in one eye, closes the period on the reason all of this exists.

Since we published: three more outcomes, and every one of them is a machine

Between 24 July and 14 August the register added three outcomes. The May-to-July run above was falls and mining. These three are not. Each is a machine with moving parts that a worker could reach, and in each the control that was missing is the same family of control.

On 24 July the operator of a glass recycling facility was fined $75,000 in the Beenleigh Magistrates Court. The machine was a bag house with an exit chute containing moving parts, inside a fenced area with a gate. A worker put his hand into the chute because he thought it was blocked, and lost two fingers to partial amputation. The prosecutor’s account of the failure is strikingly small: the gate to the chute area was not locked, and the emergency stop button was obscured rather than clearly identifiable. The magistrate placed the offending at the lower end of seriousness and recorded no conviction. The offence date is 17 November 2021, nearly five years before the sentence.

On 29 July a food packaging manufacturer was fined $125,000 in the Caboolture Magistrates Court, the heaviest of the three. On 8 January 2025 an industrial robotic arm reactivated, knocked a worker over and bore down on them, causing three broken ribs and bruising and swelling to the torso. There was no isolation procedure for the plant, and no safeguard that brought the arm to a safe state before workers entered the area. Submissions were heard on 28 May and the magistrate reserved, publishing written reasons on 29 July. Reserved decisions are uncommon on this register, where most entries are sentenced on the day.

On 14 August a Bundaberg manufacturer of roofing components was fined $85,000 in the Brisbane Magistrates Court. A roll-form machine making metal roof battens ran in automatic mode while inadequately guarded. A worker reached into the area where the battens were ejected and suffered severed tendons and a laceration to her hand. She recovered and returned to work with the company. She had been employed about four and a half months.

That case carries the detail worth the whole section. She had been told not to access the machine while it was running. She had also been given a standing duty to periodically tighten securing lock nuts that worked loose during operation. The instruction and the task pulled against each other, and she tensioned the nuts with the machine running. The court did not treat the instruction as an answer: the magistrate accepted the prosecution’s submission that instruction was “the lowest order of control” and that the company was required to implement guarding to restrict access. After the incident, the company installed perimeter guarding.

That is the thread through all three. A locked gate and a visible stop button, an isolation procedure, a physical guard. In each case the missing control was one that does not depend on a person remembering, and in the third a court said so in as many words. It is the same argument our isolation and lock-out explainer makes from the other direction.

And one from inside the original period that we missed

Re-reading the register in full turned up an outcome from within this story’s own window that the first version did not carry. It should have, because it is a death.

On 18 June, in the Southport Magistrates Court, an individual was convicted after trial of breaching the duty every worker carries under section 28(b), and pleaded guilty at the start of that trial to a second charge of failing to notify the regulator. In early 2024 a company renovating a bathroom subcontracted the demolition. A trailer had been left on the road, and the defendant moved it with his own vehicle. He attached the tow ball coupling and did not attach either of the trailer’s safety chains. Reversing down a sloping driveway, the coupling detached. The trailer rolled and crushed an 18-year-old worker who was standing in front of the garage door giving directions. The injuries were fatal. The trailer’s breakaway braking system was inoperable, but the coupling and the chains themselves were found to be in satisfactory condition. The failure was simply not attaching them.

Two things mark this one out on the register. First, a conviction was recorded for each offence. In all three of the machinery cases above, no conviction was recorded. Second, the proportion. The maximum available fine for the company matters above is $1.5 million, and the fines drawn were between 5 and 8.3 per cent of it. The maximum for this worker-duty charge is $150,000, and the fine was $75,000, or half. The maxima differ because the duties do: a worker’s duty under section 28(b) is not a corporation’s primary duty, and the two ranges are not comparable in dollars. As a share of what each court could have imposed, they are.

Those two maxima are worth showing your working on, because the Act does not state either of them in dollars. Section 32 sets a category 2 maximum of 15,000 penalty units for a body corporate and 1,500 for an individual, and the Work Health and Safety Act defines no penalty unit at all. The value comes from a different statute, and it is unusually tidy: the Penalties and Sentences Act fixes a penalty unit at $100 specifically for the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, the Electrical Safety Act 2002, the Safety in Recreational Water Activities Act 2011, where the general Queensland unit is $110. So the round numbers are round because Parliament made them round for these three Acts, not because anyone estimated.