WA's 2026 workplace safety convictions total $2.6 million, and the fatal one turned on a $300 part

Western Australia moved to the model work health and safety laws later than the eastern states, and its convictions are still a thinner seam than New South Wales or Queensland. That makes each one worth reading properly rather than counting. WorkSafe WA does not run a rolling court-report register; it publishes a summary document per conviction, and notes on the page that it does not publish summaries of acquittals. Three summaries sit under the 2026 heading. We downloaded all three and read them in full, along with the offence provisions they were charged under.

The death: $1,750,000, and a lifting device someone made

On 2 July 2024 a rigger employed by AR Constructions (WA) Pty Ltd was killed at an industrial construction site in Malaga. The company was erecting structural steel for a warehouse, standing columns with a mobile crane, a job the summary says had been done about 400 times on a recent project.

The company specified proprietary RUD swivel lifting devices for the task, known on site as pinkies because they were pink. Also on the crane, in the same hatches, was what the summary calls the Pink Lug: an M16 bolt welded to an eye plate by an unknown member of AR Constructions. It was not rated, not marked with a working load limit, and its weld was defective. It was the same colour as the compliant devices, and both directors knew it was on site.

On the second column of the day the dogman attached the Pink Lug. The column, 11.15 metres and about 368 kilograms, was lifted and left suspended while he stepped away. The rigger entered the crush zone, and the weld connecting the Pink Lug’s eye plate and bolt failed under load. He was killed.

What makes this more than an equipment story is what the company’s own paperwork already said. The safe work method statement required no personnel to stand in the crush zone while crane is operating. Identify any other possible crush zones and stay clear. It also, in the summary’s words, identified that dropped objects presented an extreme risk that could cause a fatality or a serious, permanent disability. The document named the hazard that killed him.

But the summary also records that it was not possible to complete the Task without two workers entering well within the crush zone. That is the sentence to sit with. The control on paper was a rule the work as designed could not obey, which is a different and more common failure than a missing procedure. A rule nobody can follow is not a control; it is a record that somebody thought about the hazard.

After the incident the company audited its lifting equipment, built a rigging register and bought new rated lifters, which cost approximately $300.00 each. AR Constructions appointed an external administrator and entered liquidation on 1 April 2026, before it was sentenced on 22 June.

$550,000: a boom that had a sticker on it

R.G.R. Road Haulage Pty Ltd, a trucking company running about 72 vehicles out of depots including Newman, was fined $550,000 over an incident on 25 July 2022 involving a MegaFill pump, a mobile water pump with folding booms. Secured for transport, the intake boom takes a holding chain, a strap and a travel mount bolt. The contractor that had been using the pump folded the booms and applied the travel strap, but did not fit the chain or the travel bolt. R.G.R.’s employees did not strap the whole machine or check whether the bolt or chain had been fitted before loading it for the run to Perth.

The boom itself carried the instruction. The summary records a sticker on top of it reading Danger load must be securely fastened for transport, with the same sticker on the side of the discharge boom. This is the duty that catches people out: R.G.R. was charged under section 19(2), the duty owed to other people affected by your work, not only to your own employees.

$135,000: nails where the method statement said bolts

SRG Global CASC Pty Ltd was fined $135,000 over an injury on 13 September 2022 at Henderson, on Defence work at HMAS Stirling. SRG had covered a hole of roughly 1.7 by 7.6 metres in a concrete slab with about six sheets of plywood. Its own safe work method statement said penetration covers must be mechanically fixed e.g. bolts or screwed to minimise the risk of tampering and easy removal. Nail fixing is not permitted. The plywood was fixed with at least six large nails, and stayed that way for three weeks.

High winds dislodged a sheet and it struck a worker walking onto site, injuring his left abdomen. He was not an SRG worker. He was employed by a different company, and the summary is explicit that there was no contractual relationship between them and no overlap in scope of work. They were simply on the same site. That is the section 19(2) duty again, and it is the one subcontractors most often assume belongs to the principal contractor.

Where these penalties sit against the maximum

The three convictions run across all three offence categories, which is unusual in a set this small and makes the ladder legible. The maxima below are read from the Act itself, not from a summary of it.

The fatality drew exactly half the available maximum. We are not going to tell you what the court meant by that, because the summaries record outcomes and not sentencing remarks, and inferring a reason from a round number is how a story stops being true.

What a Category 1 offence is in WA, and what it is not

This is worth being precise about, because the categories do not mean the same thing everywhere. In WA a Category 1 offence under section 31(1) is made out where a duty holder fails to comply and the failure causes the death of, or serious harm to, an individual. It turns on causation. It does not require proof that anyone was reckless.

That sits below a separate crime. WA also has industrial manslaughter in section 30A, which requires that the person engaged in the conduct knowing that the conduct is likely to cause the death of, or serious harm to, an individual and in disregard of that likelihood, and carries up to $10,000,000 for a body corporate. The evidentiary bar is materially higher, so a Category 1 charge after a workplace death is not a lesser version of the same thing; it is a different offence with a different element to prove.

Category 2, section 32(1), needs only that the failure exposes an individual to a risk of death or of injury or harm to the individual’s health. Nobody has to be hurt. R.G.R. was convicted on that footing.

The lag, and a result that runs against our own earlier finding

We have been measuring how long a work health and safety prosecution takes from offence to sentence, because the delay is invisible in any single announcement and shapes whether enforcement deters anybody. In NSW we found six convictions in a fortnight and not one under three years, then revised that in August when two of four came in faster. Western Australia adds a third jurisdiction, and the shape is not what we expected.

The death was the fastest of the three to reach sentence, by nearly two years. The intuition runs the other way: a fatality means a coronial interest, a bigger brief and a harder charge, so you expect it to be the slow one. Here the two non-fatal matters took nearly four years each and the fatal one took just under two.

Three cases cannot carry a rule, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does is put a question worth asking to the other regulators: whether the seriousness of the outcome pulls a matter forward in the queue, and what that means for the injury cases that sit for four years while the business, the worker and the evidence all move on. We will keep counting.

Update, 28 August 2026: we counted, and this hypothesis is wrong. We read all 26 WorkSafe WA summaries for 2024 to 2026. The median wait is 2.62 years, and cases where the failure caused a death took a median 2.66 years against 2.57 for everything else. Severity does not move a matter up the queue, and the 1.97-year case below turns out to be the fastest in three years of convictions rather than the leading edge of a pattern. The full series is in WA work safety prosecutions take a median 2.6 years, and a death does not make them faster. Nothing else on this page has changed.

What a duty holder should take from three cases

Our view, labelled as such. The common thread here is not ignorance of a hazard. In every one of these three, the right control was known and written down somewhere: in a method statement, on a manufacturer’s sticker, in a standard. What failed was the distance between the document and the deck. A method statement that forbids standing in a crush zone, on a task that cannot be done without standing in the crush zone, is the clearest version of that gap we have seen written into a court record.

The cheap, checkable question it suggests: for each control your paperwork relies on, can the job actually be done while obeying it, and is the non-compliant option physically available in the same box as the compliant one? An unrated lug the same colour as the rated one, in the same hatch, is not a training problem.

Sources

1. WorkSafe WA, Prosecution summaries of convictions under the WHS legislation: 2026 (published 8 May 2026, last updated 23 July 2026, read 28 August 2026; re-read 3 October 2026, by then last updated 1 September 2026 and listing four summaries): the 2026 summaries listed, and the note that WorkSafe does not publish summaries of acquittals.
2. WorkSafe WA, Prosecution summary of conviction: AR Constructions (WA) Pty Ltd (Administrators Appointed) (PDF, downloaded and read 28 August 2026): charge MI4638/2026, sections 19(1) and 31(1), $1,750,000, sentenced 22 June 2026, offence 2 July 2024; the Malaga site and the crane task; the RUD Lifters and the Pink Lug, its M16 bolt welded to an eye plate by an unknown member of the company, unrated and unmarked with a working load limit, the defective weld, its colour and storage, and the directors' awareness of it; the safe work method statement wording on the crush zone and the finding that the task could not be completed without two workers entering it; the extreme-risk rating for dropped objects; the 11.15m, 368kg column and the weld failing under load; the approximately $300.00 replacement lifters; and the 1 April 2026 liquidation.
3. WorkSafe WA, Prosecution summary of conviction: R.G.R. Road Haulage Pty Ltd (PDF, downloaded and read 28 August 2026): charge CA792/2024, sections 19(2) and 32(1), $550,000, sentenced 13 April 2026, offence 25 July 2022; the fleet of approximately 72 vehicles and the Newman depot; the MegaFill pump's chain, strap and travel mount bolt; the contractor's omission of the chain and bolt; the sticker reading that the load must be securely fastened for transport.
4. WorkSafe WA, Prosecution summary of conviction: SRG Global CASC Pty Ltd (PDF, downloaded and read 28 August 2026): charge FR9607/2024, sections 19(2) and 33, $135,000, sentenced 25 June 2026, offence 13 September 2022; the Henderson site and the HMAS Stirling contract; the approximately 1.7m by 7.6m riser void and roughly six plywood sheets; the method statement requiring mechanical fixing and prohibiting nails; the at least six large nails; and that the injured worker was employed by another company with no contractual relationship to SRG.
5. WorkSafe WA, Prosecution summary of conviction: Evolution Mining (Mungari) Pty Ltd (PDF, downloaded and read 3 October 2026): charge KA1818/2024, sections 19(1) and 32(1), $200,000, costs $15,392.20, sentenced 14 August 2026, offence 17 April 2022, guilty plea, Magistrates Court of Western Australia at Perth; the gold mine near Kalgoorlie, the contracted mining services company and its heavy diesel mechanic; the mobile stacker conveyor, its tail drum and the side access port whose guarding had been absent since May 2021; the daily belt adjustment with no specific procedure; the sleeve caught at a nip point and the crush injury and fracture; the statement that the prosecution did not allege Evolution's failure caused the injuries; and the practicable measure of enforcing isolation before access.
6. Western Australian Parliamentary Counsel's Office, Work Health and Safety Act 2020 (WA), official version as at 31 January 2025 [PCO 00-g0-00] (PDF, 312 pages, downloaded and read 28 August 2026): section 30A industrial manslaughter, its knowledge and disregard elements and the $10,000,000 body corporate penalty; section 31(1) Category 1 and its causation element, $3,500,000 for a body corporate; section 32(1) Category 2 and its risk-exposure element, $1,800,000; and section 33 Category 3, $570,000.

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