Workplace safety in Australia is set by legislation that places legal duties on the people who run a business and on the people who do the work. These duties are practical instructions about hazards, equipment, training, and how safety decisions get made. Regulators enforce them, and courts can impose a fine or a prison term on a business that ignores them. Every worker has their own duties which apply from the moment their work starts.
What Workplace Safety Means Under Australian Law
Workplace safety under Australian law is an obligation to eliminate risks to health and safety, and to minimise any risk that cannot be eliminated “so far as is reasonably practicable”. Health covers your psychological health as well as your physical health, so the same duty applies to chemical exposure as it does to sustained bullying.
The people the legislation covers extend well past anyone on a payroll. A worker includes an employee, a contractor, a subcontractor, a labour hire staff member, an apprentice, a trainee, a work experience student, and a volunteer. Members of the public affected by your work are covered too.
The Two Sets of Work Health and Safety Laws in Australia
Which workplace safety statute applies to you depends on where your work is done. Safe Work Australia model WHS laws, and each jurisdiction had to pass its own version before that template held any legal force locally.
The Commonwealth, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, and Queensland implemented the model laws on 1 January 2012. South Australia and Tasmania implemented them on 1 January 2013, and Western Australia’s version became operational on 31 March 2022. Victorian employers hold their own duties under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, covering safe systems of work, plant, substances, facilities, information, training, and supervision
The Primary Duty of Care
The primary duty of care requires a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) to ensure the health and safety of their workers and of anyone else whose health and safety could be affected by the work.
“Reasonably practicable” refers to:
how likely the hazard or the risk is to occur
how much harm could result
what the person with the duty knows or ought to reasonably to know about the hazard and how to eliminate or minimise it
whether those ways are available and suitable
the cost of eliminating or minimising the risk
A duty holder cannot transfer a duty to someone else by contract or by agreement, which is how a head contractor stays responsible for a site it has subcontracted. More than one person can hold the same duty at the same time, and one person can hold several duties at once, so a sole trader is both a PCBU and a worker.
A company officer must exercise due diligence to ensure the business complies with its obligations. Their duties are:
acquiring and keeping up-to-date knowledge of work health and safety
gaining an understanding of the operation and of the hazards and risks it creates
ensuring the business has and uses appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise those risks
ensuring the business has processes for receiving and considering information about incidents, hazards, and risks, and for responding to that information in a timely way
ensuring the business has and implements processes for complying with its duties
verifying that those resources and processes are provided and used
An officer means a company director, a company secretary, or anyone who makes decisions affecting the whole or a substantial part of the business. An officer can be prosecuted for a failure of due diligence even where the business is prosecuted for the same incident.
Your Employer's Obligations
Your employer’s workplace safety obligations are what the business has to provide and maintain. Their primary duty covers the work environment, the equipment used, the way work is organised, and the information workers receive. Your employer must provide and maintain:
a work environment without risks to your physical or psychological health
safe use and storage of machinery, equipment, appliances, containers, and tools
safe procedures for how a task gets done
adequate and accessible facilities such as toilets, drinking water, and eating areas
information, training, and supervision to protect everyone from risks
monitoring of worker health and of workplace conditions
Psychological health has the same standing as physical health under the duty. Regulators publish guidance on mentally healthy workplaces, and the hazards covered include unreasonable job demands, poor support from supervisors, bullying, sexual harassment, and aggression from customers or clients. A business has to identify and control these hazards using the same duty that applies to a trip hazard or a live electrical circuit.
Your Obligations as a Worker
Workplace safety legislation gives you four obligations of your own. You must:
take reasonable care for your own health and safety
take reasonable care that your actions do not adversely affect the health and safety of others.
comply with any reasonable instruction your employer gives.
cooperate with any reasonable workplace policy or procedure
Reasonable care means the care a person in your position would exercise. It accounts for your role, your training, your experience, and what you know about the hazard in front of you. A first-week apprentice and a site supervisor are each held to the standard appropriate to their own position. A worker who ignores a safety instruction and exposes someone to a risk can be prosecuted under the same offence categories that apply to a business.
If you have a reasonable concern that doing a task would expose you to a serious risk to your health or safety from an immediate or imminent hazard, you can stop that work and must tell your supervisor as soon as you can. Otherwise, do the work as instructed and raise your concern through your workplace’s issue resolution procedure.
Risk Management
Risk management is the process that keeps workplace safety current as work changes. The four steps are:
Identify hazards. Find what could cause harm by inspecting the workplace, reviewing incident records, reading safety and equipment manuals, checking safety alerts from your regulator, and asking the people who do the job.
Assess the risk. Name the actual harm the hazard causes, check the safety data sheet or manufacturer’s manual, and rate the worst credible outcome from low through to extreme. Then count who could be harmed, how close they get, and how long they spend near the hazard. Rate likelihood from rare through to certain, how long the hazard is present, and what your incident, near-miss, sick leave, and worker complaint records already show.
Control the risk. Work down the hierarchy of controls and apply the most protective measure that is reasonably practicable, and combine measures where one on its own leaves part of the risk in place.
Review the controls. Regularly check that each control is still controlling the risk, and run a review after an incident, after a change to the work, when a new hazard appears, or when a health and safety representative asks for one.
The Hierarchy of Controls
The hierarchy of controls ranks workplace safety measures from the most protective to the least. The ranking reflects how much each control depends on people behaving as expected.
Elimination comes first, and it gives the highest level of protection. Removing the hazard leaves nothing to manage.
The next level minimises the risk through substitution, isolation, or engineering controls. Substitution replaces the hazard with something less harmful, such as a water-based paint in place of a solvent-based one. Isolation separates people from the hazard, such as concrete barriers between pedestrians and powered equipment. Engineering controls are physical changes to equipment or the workplace, such as guarding over moving parts, mechanical hoists for heavy items, or extraction ventilation for welding fumes.
Administrative controls change how people work through safe work procedures, job rotation, restricted access, signage, permit systems, and scheduling noisy work for times when fewer people are nearby. They depend on training, supervision, and memory.
Personal protective equipment is the lowest level. Hard hats, safety glasses, hearing protection, respirators, gloves, high-visibility clothing, and safety footwear reduce the harm a hazard causes without reducing the hazard itself.
The Role of Consultation
Consultation puts workplace safety decisions in front of the people who do the work. Your employer must consult with workers who are or are likely to be directly affected by a health and safety issue, so far as is reasonably practicable. Consultation is a duty in its own right, and a failure to consult is an offence even where nobody has been injured.
Your employer has to share relevant information about the issue, give you a reasonable opportunity to express your views and contribute to the decision, take those views into account, and advise you of the outcome in a timely way. Where you and your employer have agreed procedures for consultation, your employer has to follow them. Your employer must consult you when:
identifying hazards and assessing risks arising from the work.
deciding how to eliminate or minimise those risks.
deciding whether facilities for the welfare of workers are adequate.
proposing changes that may affect your health or safety.
deciding the procedures for consultation, for resolving safety issues, for monitoring. worker health, for monitoring workplace conditions, and for providing information and training.
Health and Safety Reps
Any worker can ask for a health and safety representative to be elected. Health and safety reps can:
represent their work group on safety issues.
investigate complaints from workers.
monitor the business’s compliance.
inquire into anything that appears to pose a risk.
be present at an interview about safety with the worker’s consent.
issue a provisional improvement notice requiring a duty holder to address a risk.
direct unsafe work to stop where the risk is serious and immediate.
Your employer has to work with the representative by:
consult with the representative.
give them access to information about hazards and about the health and safety of the work group.
pay for course fees and wages for approved training.
keep a current list of representatives on display.
establish a health and safety committee within two months of a request from a representative or from five or more workers.
What Happens When Workplace Safety Duties Are Breached
A breach of workplace safety duties are handled by a regulator. They may issue:
An improvement notice.
A prohibition notice stops an activity immediately and keeps it stopped until the risk is removed to the inspector’s satisfaction.
A non-disturbance notice preserves a site or a piece of equipment so an investigation can proceed.
An infringement notice imposes an on-the-spot fine for certain offences.
An enforceable undertaking is a binding written commitment to specific safety improvements, accepted by the regulator in place of a prosecution, and it is unavailable for a category 1 allegation.
The duty holder has to display the notice prominently at the workplace, and a failure to display it is an offence in itself. A failure to comply with a notice is a further offence, and the regulator can apply to a court for an injunction or take direct action to make the site safe and recover the cost from the duty holder.
Maximum penalty amounts differ between jurisdictions, and they rise each financial year under an indexation formula tied to the Consumer Price Index. The amount also depends on who the duty holder is, with the highest maximums applying to a body corporate, lower maximums to a person acting as a PCBU or as an officer, and lower ones again to a worker.
Getting Your White Card Training
General construction induction training is where the law becomes site conduct. Anyone doing construction work in Australia is required to hold a white card.
Our course gives you working knowledge of construction hazards and the risk assessment steps that apply to them, PPE selection and use, safety signs and symbols, emergency response procedures, safe manual task technique, incident reporting, working at heights awareness, electrical safety, and asbestos awareness. It also covers your duty of care, your employer’s PCBU responsibilities, and the consultation processes that let you raise a hazard through the right channel.
The legislation gives you rights and duties whether or not you know them. Our course gives you that knowledge in a way that you can use.
FAQs
What's The Difference Between OHS & WHS?
OHS and WHS are two names for the same field of workplace safety law, with Victoria using occupational health and safety and every other Australian jurisdiction using work health and safety.
Is A White Card Only For Construction Training?
A white card covers any construction work, so surveyors, event staging crews, and mining or infrastructure workers doing construction work all need one.
What Constitutes a "Serious Injury"?
A serious injury is legally defined as one requiring immediate treatment as an in-patient in a hospital, immediate treatment for a listed injury, or medical treatment within 48 hours of exposure to a substance.
