Lack of Proactive Officer Duties Drives a 30 % Higher Workplace Fatality Rate

Victoria’s workplace health and safety regulator, WorkSafe Victoria, recorded 12 workplace fatalities in the 12 months to 21 November 2025.

Twelve deaths in a single year — across industries where the risks and control measures are well understood — is an unacceptable toll by any measure. The causes remain unchanged: structural collapses, unguarded machinery, falls from height, fatigue-related vehicle incidents, and chemical explosions, concentrated in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and transport/logistics.

Safe Work Australia data confirm Victoria’s traumatic fatality rate continues to exceed the national average and the rates in every other mainland jurisdiction.

In 2023 Victoria recorded 1.9 deaths per 100,000 workers — the highest of any mainland state — against a national average of 1.4. Preliminary 2025 figures place Victoria at approximately 1.8 per 100,000 while the national rate and most model WHS jurisdictions continue their downward trend.

Persistent and systemic failures by Victorian company directors and senior managers

In every one of the 12 Victorian cases this year, WorkSafe established breaches of the employer’s primary duties under sections 21–23 of the VIC OHS Act and found that officers had failed to take all reasonable measures to prevent those breaches. This activated corporate liability under S.155 (conduct of directors and employees imputed to the company) and personal liability of officers under S.144 — (officers deemed “in default”).

As of November, 2025, 9 of the 12 incidents have already resulted in charges, several under Victoria’s industrial manslaughter laws.

No due diligence requirements in Victoria

Sections 144 and 145 of the Victoria OHS Act remain fundamentally inadequate: they impose no positive duty, prescribe no steps, and create no obligation for officers to act until after a worker has died and a corporate offence is proven.

The vague “all reasonable measures” test offers directors and senior managers almost unlimited room to claim ignorance or to point to isolated policies that were never implemented or verified. In practice, these sections do not drive prevention; they merely provide a basis for punishment after the fact, and even then, only when WorkSafe has the resources to prosecute.

The Victorian framework is purely reactive: officer accountability arises only after a corporate breach has been proven and, in these cases, after a worker has died.

Officer Accountability under WHS Model Law

In every other mainland state and territory, section 27 of the model WHS Act imposes a positive, continuous duty on officers to exercise due diligence to ensure the business complies with its health and safety obligations. This duty exists whether or not any incident has occurred and requires officers to:

• acquire and keep up-to-date knowledge of work health and safety matters,

• gain an understanding of the nature of the operations and the hazards and risks associated with them,

• ensure the business has and uses appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise those risks,

• ensure processes exist for receiving, considering, and responding in a timely way to information about incidents, hazards, and risks,

• ensure the business has processes for complying with its duties and obligations, and

• verify that those resources and processes are actually being provided and used.

Regulators and courts in NSW, Queensland, and elsewhere routinely examine board minutes, risk registers, audit schedules, resource decisions, and verification reports — often months or years before any incident — to determine whether the officer met these requirements.

~30 % higher fatalities highlights legislative shortcomings

The persistent ~30 % higher fatality rate in Victoria compared with model WHS states — despite both jurisdictions facing the same industries and hazards — strongly correlates with the absence of a proactive officer due-diligence framework.

Every other mainland state has required directors and senior managers to demonstrate ongoing, verifiable safety governance since the Model WHS laws were enacted in 2011.

Victoria remains the only jurisdiction that still waits for a worker to die before testing whether “reasonable measures” were taken.

This structural failure in Victoria’s regulatory framework, combined with the identical nature of preventable incidents across the country, makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the continued refusal to impose positive, pre-emptive officer duties is a major contributing factor to Victoria’s stubbornly elevated workplace death toll.” 

No matter where your organisation is headquartered or managed from, if your business also has operations in Victoria, the health and safety management system at your VIC locations must comply with Victoria State laws and State regulator initiatives. VIC is the only state left in Australia that is not on the Model WHS Laws introduced in 2011.

Despite similarities between VIC and other State jurisdictions, a management system based on Model WHS laws cannot be repurposed into a VIC OHS management system without major modifications.

For information on how to successfully manage health and safety management systems over multiple jurisdictions please contact Courtenell. We have multiple short and specific training options to help directors, CEOs, managers, and supervisors manage NSW businesses with operations in additional jurisdictions.