Digging Deeper

A patchwork that is hard to navigate

Industrial manslaughter laws did not arrive all at once. They began with tragedy. In October 2016, two workers were crushed at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm racecourse. Days later, four people died on the Thunder River Rapids ride at Dreamworld. Queensland responded with an industrial manslaughter offence in 2017.

Other jurisdictions followed, but not in step. The Northern Territory and Victoria legislated in 2020. Western Australia followed in 2022. South Australia and the Commonwealth acted in 2023. New South Wales and Tasmania completed the map in 2024.

The result is national coverage without national consistency. Each jurisdiction defines the offence slightly differently. The fault element, the trigger a prosecutor must prove, varies from state to state.

Queensland targets negligent conduct by a business or senior officer. Victoria and Tasmania apply a test of criminal negligence. New South Wales uses the term gross negligence. Western Australia frames its offence around recklessness or negligence in its own way.

These differences sound technical. They are not trivial. A workplace death in one state may meet the threshold for industrial manslaughter, while the same facts in another may not. Lawyers describe the landscape as difficult to navigate with confidence. Safe Work Australia has flagged the inconsistency as a problem still to solve.

Penalties vary too. New South Wales carries the heaviest, up to 25 years imprisonment for an individual and fines up to $20 million for a company. Victoria allows 25 years and $16.5 million. The Northern Territory allows life imprisonment. Tasmania allows 21 years and $18 million. Queensland and Western Australia sit around 20 years and $10 million or more. These are not parking fines. They are among the most serious penalties in Australian law.

The numbers behind the law

The human case for industrial manslaughter laws is stark. In 2024, 188 workers died from traumatic injuries at work in Australia. That is roughly one death every two days.

The toll is not spread evenly. Vehicle incidents caused 42 per cent of deaths. Falls from height caused 13 per cent. Being hit by moving objects caused another 9 per cent. Six industries account for around three-quarters of all worker deaths.

Some of those industries sit squarely in the small business economy. Transport, construction, agriculture, and manufacturing carry the highest fatality counts. Machinery operators, drivers, and labourers face the greatest risk of a fatal outcome.

The fatality rate has fallen 24 per cent over the past decade. That is genuine progress. But the decline has plateaued in recent years. Nearly 200 families still lose someone at work every year. That is the reality industrial manslaughter laws were written to address.

Why prosecutions are so rare

Here is the paradox. Industrial manslaughter laws exist everywhere. Deaths continue. Yet convictions are few.

Research from the Australian Catholic University, led by Associate Professor Trajce Cvetkovski with Queensland barrister Neville Weston, examined this directly. Their finding was blunt. Almost a decade after Queensland acted, very few individuals have been prosecuted, and those who were tended not to be senior corporate figures.

The reasons are structural. Prosecuting a company for industrial manslaughter often means identifying a specific individual whose conduct breached the duty and caused the death. Lifting the corporate veil to reach directors and executives is legally hard. Complex corporate structures make it harder.

Prosecution pathways also differ. In some jurisdictions the regulator decides whether to prosecute. In others the matter must go to the Director of Public Prosecutions. That fragmentation affects the speed, independence, and consistency of decisions.

The researchers raise a provocative question. If industrial manslaughter laws are producing so few results, should the most serious conduct be dealt with elsewhere in the criminal law entirely? That debate is live. It is not settled.

For business owners, the debate matters less than one fact. Regulators are investing in enforcement. New South Wales has committed $6.9 million to a dedicated industrial manslaughter prosecution unit. The direction of travel is toward more scrutiny of individuals, not less.

The duty that binds you now

This is the part that should reshape how you think about the whole issue. Industrial manslaughter sits at the top of the pyramid. Beneath it lies a duty that applies to you every day.

Under the model Work Health and Safety Act, every officer of a business must exercise due diligence. An officer is not only a director. It includes anyone who makes decisions affecting the whole, or a substantial part, of the business.

That duty is personal. It cannot be delegated. You cannot hand it to a safety manager, a consultant, or an adviser and consider yourself covered. An officer can be prosecuted for failing this duty even if no one is hurt, and even if the business itself is never charged.

The law sets out six elements of due diligence. In plain terms, an officer must:

• Keep up to date knowledge of work health and safety matters.
• Understand the operations of the business and their hazards.
• Ensure the business has and uses appropriate resources to manage risk.
• Ensure there are processes to receive and respond to information about incidents and hazards.
• Ensure the business has processes for complying with its duties.
• Verify that all of the above are actually in place and working.

The last point is the one most often missed. Verification means checking that your systems work, not assuming they do. Courts have made this clear.

Two recent cases show the line. In one, a director was acquitted despite the company breaching its duty, because he had appointed a safety manager, required regular reporting, visited sites, and followed up. In another, a director was found liable because there were no risk assessments, no written safe work methods, and no verification when a wall collapsed and injured a worker.

The message is consistent. You do not have to do the safety work personally. You do have to ensure it exists, resource it, and check it. And you have to be able to prove you did.