Safe Work Australia writes the rules and enforces none of them

What Safe Work Australia actually is

It is a national policy body that writes model laws. In 2011, Safe Work Australia developed the model work health and safety (WHS) laws to be implemented across Australia. Those models come in three parts: the model WHS Act, the model WHS Regulations, and the model Codes of Practice.

What it is not is the body that comes to your workplace. In its own words: Safe Work Australia is responsible for maintaining the model WHS laws, but we don't regulate or enforce them. And on enforcement: Commonwealth and state and territory regulators oversee and enforce the laws in their jurisdictions.

The site puts the same point in a single line above its own navigation: The Commonwealth, states and territories regulate and enforce WHS laws.

A model law is not a law until your jurisdiction makes it one

This is the sentence that matters most for anyone reading a model code and assuming it applies to them: To become legally binding the Commonwealth, states and territories must separately implement them as their own laws.

So the model WHS Act is a template. It has legal force in a jurisdiction only in the form that jurisdiction enacted, and the instrument that binds you is your own state or territory Act and Regulations, not the model on the Safe Work Australia website.

Every jurisdiction except one

The model laws have been implemented in all jurisdictions except Victoria.

That single exception does more work than any other fact on this page. A national employer with a site in Melbourne and a site anywhere else is running under two different statutes, not one statute with local quirks. Anything written about duties, notification or officer obligations under the model law needs checking against Victorian law separately, and we treat it that way in our own coverage.

And implementing is not the same as copying

Even among the jurisdictions that adopted, the text is not uniform. Some jurisdictions have made variations in their respective WHS laws compared with the model WHS laws, and Safe Work Australia publishes a comparison of them: The model WHS Act Cross-Comparison Table summarises these variations.

The practical consequence is a habit rather than a fact. When a model provision matters to a decision you are making, the model tells you the shape of the duty and your jurisdiction's Act tells you the words that bind you. Safe Work Australia says the same thing, more politely: For information on the operation of WHS laws in your jurisdiction, please contact your WHS regulator.

Why the models still matter

None of this makes the model laws academic. They are the reason a duty in Perth reads like a duty in Brisbane, and Safe Work Australia states the model Act's purpose this way: The main object of the Act is to provide for a balanced and nationally consistent framework to secure the health and safety of workers and workplaces.

They are also where change starts. When we report that a model code has been reissued or a model regulation amended, that is a change to the template, and each jurisdiction then decides whether and when it flows through. A reissued model code is news about what is coming, not automatically about what already binds you.