SafeWork NSW turns its new priorities into convictions within a fortnight

On 1 July 2026 SafeWork NSW published its 2026-27 Regulatory Statement, naming four enforcement priorities for the year: falls from heights, psychosocial risks, hazardous substances, and mobile plant, vehicles and fixed machinery. A statement of priorities is easy to publish and easy to discount. What makes this one worth a duty holder’s attention is what happened next. Within a fortnight, three of those four hazards had each produced a conviction in the Industrial Court of NSW, and the regulator attached to each a near-identical line: the way to control this risk is already well understood.

Three cases, three priority hazards

The largest of the three was a fall. On 15 July a carpentry company, Vanovi Carpentry Pty Ltd, was fined $120,000 after a worker stepped on a ceiling joist that collapsed, falling about six metres and suffering serious injuries in a March 2023 incident. The company pleaded guilty to a breach of section 32 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, for failing its primary duty under section 19(1) to ensure health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable. Acting SafeWork Commissioner Petrina Casey put the finding plainly: “Falls from heights are a primary cause of traumatic injuries and fatalities at NSW workplaces.”

The same day, a flour mill, Ben Furney Flour Mills Pty Ltd, was fined $90,000 after workers were exposed to chlorine gas while carrying out work in February 2023. That matter was prosecuted under section 33 of the Act, a different duty-offence provision from the other two, again for a failure of the section 19(1) duty. Casey’s comment named the second priority: “Risk control measures when working with potential hazardous substances are well known.”

The day before, on 14 July, a feedlot operator, Swain Farms Pty Ltd, was fined $60,000 after a worker was seriously injured coming into contact with an unguarded auger in August 2023, a section 32 breach of the same primary duty. Casey’s line reached for the fourth priority and widened it: “Risk control measures for working with moving plant and fixed machinery are well known. Being injured when working with fixed machinery is a preventable hazard we see across our State and in all industries.”

Why the repetition is the point

The penalties themselves are mid-range; a combined $270,000 across three companies is not, on its own, a landmark. The signal is in the sequencing and the language. A regulator published its priority hazards, and inside two weeks the courts recorded a penalty for three of them, with the regulator returning each time to a single phrase: the controls are well known. That is not the language of a novel or contested risk. Working at height, exposure to a hazardous gas and an unguarded rotating auger are among the most thoroughly documented hazards in Australian work, each with an established control (edge protection or a safer method of work; isolation, ventilation and gas detection; machine guarding). The regulator’s framing removes the defence of novelty before it can be raised.

It also arrives at a moment SafeWork NSW is keen to mark. In the same Regulatory Statement, the regulator said it had “implemented key legislative reforms” that include “making Codes of Practice legally enforceable” in the state. Where a code of practice is enforceable, the gap between what an approved code requires and what a business actually did can matter in its own right, rather than only as evidence of what was reasonably practicable. For a duty holder, that raises the value of a simple exercise: for each priority hazard you carry, can you show your controls mapped to the applicable code of practice?

The fourth priority, psychosocial risk, produced no court outcome in this fortnight. That is not a sign it is a lower priority; psychosocial matters move through investigation and improvement notices differently from a fall or a guarding failure, and the regulatory statement lists it alongside the other three. It is simply the one hazard on the list whose enforcement did not show up in a courtroom in these two weeks.

What it means outside New South Wales

The Work Health and Safety Act is model legislation, adopted in materially similar form across most of the country, and the three duties at issue here, the primary duty in section 19 and the offence provisions in sections 32 and 33, read the same in every jurisdiction that has adopted the model law. A NSW regulator naming its priorities and then enforcing them within a fortnight is therefore a reasonable preview of where inspector attention concentrates elsewhere. The practical takeaway is not jurisdiction-specific: if your business carries a fall risk, a hazardous-substance exposure or unguarded plant, the controls are, in the regulator’s own words, well known, and the burden is on the duty holder to have applied them before an inspector or a court asks.