Safety in Australia
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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 statutory standards regulating certain workplace hazards.
Until the 1970s and 80s, these standards have been extremely detailed and technical, focusing mainly on specifying machinery guarding measures to be adopted to prevent injury to workers operating dangerous machinery.
Reflecting the wave of OHS regulatory reform that swept through Australia from the mid-1970s, following the British Robens Report, the Australian States and Territories have enacted legislation that replaced the traditional style legislation with 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. They generally set out hazard identification and risk identification, assessment and control procedures.
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[edit] Acts
Each State and Territory has a principal health and safety Act that 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.
[edit] Regulations
Regulations set the standards to be achieved for the management of particular hazards such as noise, chemicals, machinery and manual handling.
[edit] Codes of Practice (Vic & NSW) / Advisory Standards (Qld)
Codes of Practice / Advisory Standards are developed to give practical guidance on how the requirements of the Act and/or Regulations can be complied with. In most cases, employers should follow the guidance in the Code/Standard, unless it can be shown that the Duty of Care can be achieved in another way.
