A single conviction release is a fine and a warning. The reason this masthead keeps subtracting one date from another is that the gap between them is the only part of enforcement a duty holder can actually plan around, and no one publishes it. In July we found six announcements and a median gap of 1,231 days. We said then that the obvious thing to test was whether the pattern held as more convictions were published. Four have been.
The four
| Defendant | Fine | Court | Incident | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kens Sand & Cement Pty Ltd | $135,000 | Industrial | 9 Feb 2023 | 1,289 |
| A farm owner | $21,000 | Industrial | 28 Jul 2023 | 1,116 |
| Ausko Design Constructions, Oh Haan Constructions and its director | $205,000 combined | Industrial | 5 Oct 2023 | 1,041 |
| Fitzmoore Group Pty Ltd | $390,000 | Industrial | 23 Oct 2023 | 1,031 |
All four are Industrial Court of NSW matters. Three of the four arise from incidents in the second half of 2023, and the fourth from February of that year. Two of them, 1,031 and 1,041 days, fall under the three-year line that nothing in July crossed.
What broke, and what held
In July the four Industrial Court matters clustered inside 61 days of each other, from 1,177 to 1,238. We wrote that this was the obvious thing to test. It did not hold. August's four Industrial matters span 258 days, from 1,031 to 1,289, and three of them sit below July's fastest. On the evidence now available the tight July cluster was a coincidence of a small sample, which is what we should expect of four numbers and is why we flagged it rather than concluded from it.
The other half of that July paragraph fared differently. We noted the two District Court matters sat about 400 days further out and said explicitly that we were not going to tell you the District Court is slower, because two cases against four is not a sample. Ten cases later, the separation is still clean: every one of the eight Industrial Court matters falls between 1,031 and 1,289 days, and both District Court matters sit at 1,601 and 1,629. The gap between the slowest Industrial matter and the fastest District one is 312 days, and nothing overlaps.
We still are not telling you the District Court is slower. The District sample is still two, and it has not grown; what has grown is the Industrial sample, from four to eight, and it has stayed on its own side of a 312-day gap. The two courts hear different classes of matter, so a difference in elapsed time is as likely to be a difference in what gets sent where as a difference in how fast anything moves. That is the point at which the releases stop being able to answer the question.
What this does and does not mean
Our view, labelled as such, and unchanged from July. This is not an accusation of delay. A prosecution needs an investigation, expert evidence, a brief, charging inside a limitation period and a place in a court list, and a regulator that moved faster by cutting any of those would be worse, not better. Nothing in any of these four releases explains why that individual case took the time it did, and we have not asked.
What the number is good for is planning. If you are a duty holder in New South Wales, the practical reading of these ten cases is that a conviction announced in July or August 2026 is describing a workplace as it stood somewhere between two years ten months and four and a half years earlier. The control you did not fix in 2023 is the one being fined in 2026. That is the whole of the argument, and it does not require anyone to be at fault for the timeline.
What to watch
Whether any District Court conviction is announced in the next few months, because that is the only thing that can move the claim we keep declining to make. Whether the Industrial Court range keeps drifting down, since August's three fastest are all below anything in July. And the announcements themselves, which SafeWork publishes roughly weekly.
Sources
- SafeWork NSW, Cement company fined $135,000 following crane incident at a construction site (announced 21 August 2026, read 25 August 2026): Kens Sand & Cement Pty Ltd, the $135,000 fine, the Industrial Court of NSW, and the incident date of 9 February 2023.
- SafeWork NSW, Building and maintenance company fined $390,000 after worker falls from 2.8 metre height (announced 19 August 2026, read 25 August 2026): Fitzmoore Group Pty Ltd, the $390,000 fine, the Industrial Court of NSW, and the incident date of 23 October 2023.
- SafeWork NSW, Farm owner fined $21,000 after auger found in use without proper safety mechanisms (announced 17 August 2026, read 25 August 2026): the $21,000 fine, the Industrial Court of NSW, and the incident date of 28 July 2023. The release names the individual; we have not, because this masthead reports companies by name and individuals by role.
- SafeWork NSW, Construction firm and director fined a combined $205,000 after worker falls from height (announced 11 August 2026, read 25 August 2026): Ausko Design Constructions Pty Ltd and Oh Haan Constructions Pty Ltd fined $100,000 and $15,000, the company director a further $90,000, the Industrial Court of NSW, and the incident date of 5 October 2023.
- The Duty Holder, Six NSW convictions in a fortnight. Not one took less than three years (31 July 2026): the six July announcements, their fines, courts, incident dates and day counts, and the July median of 1,231 days, used here for comparison and re-checked against that piece.
How we sourced this
Every figure is ours, computed from the four August releases listed above and read on 25 August 2026. The method is deliberately identical to July's so the two windows can be compared: for each conviction we take the incident date the release itself states, and the date SafeWork NSW announced the conviction, and subtract. The announcement date is the dateline the release carries at the top of its own page, not the date a listing or a sitemap reports, which on this site can differ from it by years. The window is 1 to 21 August 2026 and contains every conviction SafeWork announced in it; the two other August items, a due-diligence resource release and a ministerial announcement of 27 new inspectors, are not convictions and are excluded. The four August day counts are 1,289, 1,116, 1,041 and 1,031, giving a median of 1,078.5 across an even-numbered sample. The combined ten-case figures quoted are the eight Industrial Court matters, 1,031 to 1,289, and the two District Court matters at 1,601 and 1,629. We have not sought comment from SafeWork NSW or from any defendant, and nothing here goes beyond what the releases state.