One in six serious claims is a worker hit by a moving object. The warehouse rulebook starts with distance, not hi-vis.

The collision duty exists before the collision

A warehouse concentrates the exact mix the WHS Regulations treat with most suspicion: powered mobile plant, heavy vehicles arriving and leaving, and people on foot picking, packing and walking between them. The general PCBU duty covers all of it, but forklifts and their relatives get their own provisions. Under regulation 214, the person with management or control of powered mobile plant must manage five listed risks, including "the plant colliding with any person or thing", and regulation 215 goes further: the person "must ensure that the plant does not collide with pedestrians or other powered mobile plant", and where a collision is possible the plant must carry a warning device for the people at risk. Regulation 218 adds the industrial lift truck rules: suitable lifting attachments for the load, and no passengers unless the truck is designed to carry one in a proper seat. The wider plant duties, guarding, maintenance by a competent person, registration, are the subject of this masthead's plant and machinery page; this page is about the traffic.

Separation first: the hierarchy applied to a warehouse

The warehousing guide walks the standard hierarchy of controls in traffic terms. Elimination means removing powered mobile plant and vehicles from the workplace where reasonably practicable. Substitution means a safer machine: the guide's example is a walkie stacker in place of a forklift, and it names "low speed, stable, lightweight loadshifting equipment such as powered pallet trucks or walkie stackers" as the most effective way to reduce both the likelihood and the severity of collisions. Isolation is the signature warehouse control: overhead walkways, barriers and fences between designated pedestrian and vehicle areas, separate pedestrian doors beside vehicle entries, railings or bollards where a person could step out of a blind spot, and temporary high-visibility barriers when a container is being unpacked. Engineering controls follow: interlocked gates, zoning systems, proximity alarms and speed limiters. Only then do the administrative controls arrive, marked walkways, enforced right-of-way rules, displayed site maps, and last of all the high-visibility clothing. Hi-vis is real PPE with real duties attached, but as the PPE page sets out, the law puts it at the bottom of the order, and a traffic plan that leads with it has the hierarchy upside down. Layout does quiet work here too: the guide asks for pedestrian exclusion zones where plant operates, loadshifting equipment excluded from walkways, dedicated marked parking and recharging areas for the fleet, and dock line markings in one metre increments so drivers reverse without a spotter walking behind them.

The loading dock has its own choreography

Loading and unloading is where drivers, forklifts and loads meet, and the guide scripts it closely. Non-essential workers should be prohibited from areas where vehicles are moving or being loaded; visiting drivers get a designated safety zone to wait in, and plant operators are instructed not to load or unload "unless all workers and drivers are clear of the loading area". If a driver must watch the load, they watch from a marked safe viewing area and return only when told the operation is complete. The general traffic guide adds the hardware for the dock's other hazard, the vehicle that moves too early: vehicle and trailer restraints, dock locks, air brake isolation interlocks, braking alarms that sound if the brake is not applied when the driver exits, and systems controlling access to vehicle keys and cabins to prevent an inadvertent drive-off while a forklift is still inside the trailer. Maintenance on the machines themselves, and on the racking and dock equipment around them, falls back on the isolation and lock-out discipline covered on the electrical safety and isolation page: the plant code's rule that stored energy is released and the machine locked out before anyone works on it applies to a forklift as much as a press.

The traffic management plan is the document that proves it

Neither guide leaves traffic control as a set of habits. For a workplace with a high volume of traffic, the general guide expects a traffic management plan "developed by a competent person", tested on site by the people who wrote it and the people who must follow it, and available to workers. The warehousing guide lists what the plan should document: designated travel paths including entries, exits and crossings, pedestrian and traffic routes, how often plant and pedestrians interact, the control for each expected interaction with drawings of barriers, walkways and signs, the responsibilities of the people managing traffic and of the people interacting with it, procedures for controlling traffic in an emergency, and how the plan's effectiveness will be monitored. The plan is a living control: both guides require it to be monitored and reviewed regularly, including after an incident, and the warehousing guide puts it inside site induction, alongside the broader duty to give every worker, contractor and visiting driver information and instruction they can actually understand, in other languages where needed.

The licence in the operator's pocket

Driving a forklift is licensed work everywhere in Australia. Schedule 3 of the model WHS Regulations lists two forklift classes among its 29 classes of high risk work: LF, the forklift truck, and LO, the order-picking forklift truck, where the operator's controls elevate with the lifting media. The regulations define a forklift truck precisely, "a powered industrial truck equipped with lifting media made up of a mast and an elevating load carriage to which is attached a pair of fork arms or other arms that can be raised 900mm or more above the ground", and the definition excludes pedestrian-operated trucks and pallet trucks, which is why a walkie stacker needs no licence while the machine it replaces does. No licence does not mean no duty: the warehousing guide still requires the person with management or control to ensure workers have "the necessary training, qualifications or licenses" for whatever loadshifting equipment they operate. For the licensed classes, regulation 85 puts the burden on the business: a PCBU must see written evidence of the licence before directing or allowing the work, and a trainee may operate only under the supervision arrangements the regulations set. How the licence itself is earned, an accredited course through a registered training organisation, five-year currency, the whole Schedule 3 table, is covered on the training and licensing page.

What the claims and fatality tables say

The controls above map directly onto the national data. Being hit by moving objects produced 23,400 serious workers' compensation claims in 2023-24, 16.0 per cent of the national total, one in six, with median time lost of 5.2 weeks and median compensation of $12,700, according to Key WHS Statistics Australia 2025. On the fatality side, transport, postal and warehousing recorded 54 worker deaths in 2024, 29 per cent of the national 188 and the highest count of any industry, at a fatality rate of 7.4 per 100,000 workers against 1.3 overall; vehicle incidents were the mechanism in 42 per cent of all worker deaths nationally. The machinery operators and drivers occupation group, the people in the forklift seat, died at more than five times the national rate, a figure examined on the plant page. Numbers like these are why the warehousing guide's first answer is architectural rather than behavioural: a barrier does not get tired at the end of a shift, and a walkway that never crosses a forklift route needs no one's vigilance to work.