A police officer psychologically injured from working on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been awarded more than $1.8 million in damages, in a case examining the obligations of employers to oversee their employee assistance programs.
A PCBU breached its WHS duties by failing to alert an industrial complex's owners corporation or strata manager to the dangers posed by a damaged gate, which ultimately fell and killed a worker, a court has found in convicting and fining the PCBU $375,000.
An employer has been cleared of WHS breaches relating to an incident where defective plant was left in service and caught fire, forcing workers to seek refuge and survive on stored air until they could be evacuated.
A PCBU has been convicted and fined $255,000 for exposing two "spotters" to the risk of serious injury or death, in a case highlighting that duty holders can be prosecuted and handed hefty fines where injuries have not occurred.
A PCBU with "significant" WHS systems has been fined $525,000 over a fatality, involving its failure to implement a specific documented system of work for a task a worker was performing when he was killed.
An employer charged with WHS breaches after a blast hurled rocks at workers inside an exclusion zone has escaped conviction, with a regulator failing to prove beyond reasonable doubt that appointing a supervisor with less than "optimal" experience was a breach of the employer's duty.
In an extremely rare development, a judge has found the WHS offences of a reckless PCBU and a "worker" deserved the highest available penalties, totalling $3.15 million. They were charged over the grisly death of a man who was dragged into a woodchipper, and whose disappearance went unnoticed because the PCBU's systems were "so haphazard".
PCBUs have been reminded of their WHS duties to children, after one entity was fined over a drowning death and another over a forklift joyride. Meanwhile, the ACT has launched a campaign against workplace violence, and reminded employers of the new WHS duty to report "actual or suspected" incidents of workplace s-xual assault.
A court has ordered two companies to pay more than $1.6 million in damages to a labour-hire worker, who was injured performing a "mundane" task that was unsafe because it "included a tripping hazard as an integral part of its operation".
Relying on the evidence of a WHS expert, a woman who broke her knee at the entry of a supermarket has proved the site negligently failed to enforce its hourly inspection and cleaning systems, but failed to show this breach caused her injury.