Who holds a WHS duty, and under which Act: the plain-English map of Australia's safety laws

The three-layer structure

The system has three layers, and knowing which layer a document lives in tells you how much it binds you. The Act sets the duties and offences. The Regulations set specific requirements for specific hazards and activities. Codes of practice sit underneath: in Safe Work Australia's words they are not law, but they are admissible in court proceedings, and courts may treat an approved code as evidence of what is known about a hazard, risk or control, and rely on it to decide what was reasonably practicable in the circumstances. Ignoring a code is therefore legally possible and practically reckless: you would need to show your alternative approach delivered an equivalent or higher standard. New South Wales has gone a step further from 1 July 2026, giving approved codes the force of minimum standards under its amended Act.

The duty holders

• The PCBU, a person conducting a business or undertaking, is the primary duty holder. The term is deliberately wider than "employer": it catches companies, sole traders, partnerships, and unincorporated bodies, and the primary duty extends beyond employees to contractors, labour hire workers, apprentices, volunteers and others whose work the business influences. The duty: ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and others affected by the work.
• Officers, directors and people who make decisions affecting the whole business, owe a personal due diligence duty: keep current WHS knowledge, understand the operations and their risks, ensure resources and processes exist and are used, ensure incident information flows and is acted on, and verify all of it. An officer cannot delegate this away; it attaches to the role.
• Workers must take reasonable care for themselves and others, and comply with reasonable instructions and policies. Workers also hold rights: to consultation, to elect health and safety representatives, and to cease unsafe work in the circumstances the Act defines.

"Reasonably practicable" is the standard glued to most of these duties: what could reasonably be done, weighing the likelihood and degree of harm, what the duty holder knows or ought to know, the available controls, and, last and least, cost. Safe Work Australia publishes a dedicated interpretive guideline on the phrase, linked from the model laws hub.

Which law applies to you

The nine WHS jurisdictions, as at 5 July 2026. A business is regulated by the jurisdiction where the work is done, not where it is headquartered; Commonwealth entities and licensees sit in the Comcare scheme.

Why Victoria is different, and why it matters

Victoria never adopted the model law. NT WorkSafe's plain summary of the history is the candid one: the model was substantially based on Victoria's own legislation, and Victoria saw no need to change. The consequence for a multi-state business is real, not cosmetic: Victoria's Act speaks of employers rather than PCBUs, frames officer liability differently, runs its own penalty regime, and takes model-law changes only if and when it chooses to legislate them itself. If you operate in Victoria and anywhere else, you are complying with two different statutes, and your safety management system needs to be written against the stricter reading of both. The same split runs through the industrial manslaughter offences, where Victoria's "workplace manslaughter" sits in its own Act.

The map is about to be looked at again

Safe Work Australia is running a Best Practice Review of the model WHS Act and Regulations, the first substantive review since 2018. Consultation closed in late 2025 after 1,055 stakeholder responses, and the final report is due to be provided to WHS ministers in mid-2026, which means it is imminent as this page is published. The last review of this kind produced 35 agreed recommendations, all since implemented, including adding gross negligence to the model Act's Category 1 offence in 2022. Separately, the model Act's monetary penalties re-index every 1 July; Safe Work Australia's penalties page already carries the amounts for the year commencing 1 July 2026. We will cover the review's report when it lands.