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 modern statutory schemes regulating certain 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.
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 have 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.
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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 have been made 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.
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.
The safety regulation models reflected in Australian OHS schemes have steadily begun to be translated and adapted into other areas of regulation in Australia such as transport. The State of Victoria, for example, has created statutory general duties in legislation which applies to the rail industry (the Rail Safety Act 2006), the bus industry (the Bus Safety Act 2009) and the marine sector (the Marine Safety Act 2010).
The approach of establishing general safety duties, tailored permissioning schemes such as accreditation and a range of sanctions available to the industry regulator is being increasingly followed by other jurisdictions. The regulatory scheme reflected in the Rail Safety Act 2006, for example, was adoped nationally by the Australian Transport Council through a national model Rail Safety Bill and then subsequently adopted in the legislation of all States and Territories except for the Northern Territory. The Bus Safety Act and the Marine Safety Act are expected to have a similar impact nationally over time.