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 fines against organisations, ranked Queensland WHS court outcomes, May to July 2026. The largest was the one death. Coal mine, worker death $310,000 Solar, roof fall $105,000 Coal mine, dozer engulfment $95,000 Apprentice eye injury $90,000 Handyman jobs, fall risk $90,000 Air-conditioning, fall $85,000 Roofing, electric shock $80,000 Individual workers were also penalised, not charted here. Source: OWHSP court reports 2026
Seven organisation fines from $80,000 to $310,000. Two involved coal mines; three of the rest were falls from height.

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.

Sourcing note

Every outcome here is from the Office of the Work Health and Safety Prosecutor's published court-reports register for 2026, read case by case; the register carries the prosecutor's own disclaimer that each report is a summary, not a verbatim record of proceedings, and we have added nothing to those summaries. The register publishes matters de-identified as to the individuals involved, and we have kept them that way: organisations are described by their trade, penalties as published, and no person is named. The chart ranks the seven fines imposed on organisations; the two worker fines and the supervisor conviction are noted but not charted because no comparable single organisation penalty attaches to them. The context figures, mining and falls-from-height fatality shares and rates for calendar 2024, are from Safe Work Australia's Key WHS Statistics Australia 2025.