In common with most of Europe and North America, Australian State Parliaments have responded to the problem of workplace illness, injury, and death by enacting legislation regulating workplace hazards. Until the 1970s and 80s, these standards were generally detailed and technical, focusing mainly on prescriptive measures such as specifying machinery guarding measures to be adopted to prevent injury to workers operating dangerous machinery. Beginning in 2008, state and federal regulations were harmonised, giving greater clarity and consistency in the legislation in effect in the various states.
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Acts and regulations prior to 2012
Each State and Territory has a principal health and safety Act which sets out requirements for ensuring that workplaces are safe and healthy. These requirements spell out the general responsibilities of different groups of people who play a role in the workplace. Victoria, for example, first adopted modern occupational health and safety (OHS) legislation through the Occupational Health and Safety Act 1985. The scheme has since been renewed through the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004.
Regulations were formulated under occupational health and safety statutes to set the standards to be achieved for the management of particular hazards such as noise, chemicals, machinery and manual handling. Reflecting the wave of occupational health and safety regulation reform that swept through Australia from the mid-1970s, following the British Robens Report, the Australian States and Territories enacted legislation that replaced the traditional style legislation with performance-based legislation imposing broad general duties, with regulations and codes generally abandoning technical, detailed, specification standards, and instead using a mix of general duties of care, performance standards and process standards. The laws generally set out hazard identification and risk identification, assessment, and control procedures.
WHS harmonisation
The process of harmonization commenced in July 2008 when the Australian Commonwealth, state and territory governments signed an intergovernmental agreement to agree to harmonise health and safety laws across Australia. That process resulted in a National review with over 232 recommendations submitted to workplace relations ministerial council members for approval. Following on from the review and recommendations being endorsed by ministers the National model Work Health and Safety Act was drafted and sent out for public comment in late 2009. Ministers endorsed that Act in December 2009. Following on from that process has been the development of the model regulations and codes of practice. Their intergovernmental agreement (IGA) requires each jurisdiction to implement the moral legislation as mirror laws in their jurisdiction by the first of January 2012. Essentially this means section 16 of the Queensland act should be the same as the section 16 of the Victorian act or in New South Wales.
Implementation Dates:
Benefits of harmonised law
The process provides legislative clarity for all stakeholders.
Businesses gain an improved understanding of health and safety law regardless of the state they operate in and compliance costs are lower as there are fewer differing requirements, less training needs and a reduced requirement for local subject matter experts.
Governments benefit from reduced expenditure for developing health and safety law.
Codes of practice
The model WHS Act and Regulation are supported by codes of practice Codes of Practice are developed to give practical guidance on how the requirements of the Workplace Health & Safety Act 2011 and Workplace Health & Safety Regulation 2011. Codes of Practice are very important documents; The codes of practice are admissible in court as evidence of whether a duty has been complied with. They’ll also provide evidence of what is known about a particular hazard or risk in control measures and can also be relied on determining what is reasonably practicable. Those codes of practice really set the benchmark and you can choose to follow that code or you can choose to follow another way that provides the same or better level of protection. So a good example in this respect is there is a general risk assessment code of practice. As an alternative to following that code, larger organisations may choose to follow the international standard on managing risk in ISO 31000.