Best Practice Review

Submission by the Australian Council of Trade Unions to the Best Practice Review of the Model Work Health and Safety Laws

Healthy and safe work is a fundamental human right and essential to decent work. Every worker has an equal right to a healthy and safe working environment.

Australian unions are supportive of a best practice, nationally consistent legislative scheme for work health and safety matters, which provides the highest level of protection from hazards and risks and ensures that all workers can exercise their rights and entitlements, regardless of their working arrangements, where they live and the location of their work.

Harmonisation must not come at the expense of existing protections or standards in any jurisdiction. Instead, harmonisation should serve as a vehicle to lift standards across the country, making ‘best practice’ the baseline for all workers.

The model WHS Act and Regulations (model laws) establish an important foundation built on participation and representation, prevention, equality, and accountability. These are the hallmarks of a rights-based approach. This approach recognises that safe and healthy work is not simply a compliance obligation but a fundamental entitlement of all workers.

While the model laws have been successful in promoting systematic risk management and embedding consultation and representation as a foundation, there remain important gaps in how these rights are realised in practice. In particular, the framework often places too much weight on managerial control and procedural compliance, rather than on empowering workers and their representatives to actively shape health and safety outcomes in the workplace. Notably, the model WHS Regulations fail to provide equal protection against psychosocial hazards as they do for physical hazards.

We believe that the current model laws place unnecessary limits on workers’ and registered unions’ power to act, obtain information and enforce compliance. The current framework provides the regulator with a prosecutorial monopoly, which severely restricts avenues for enforcement and accountability when regulators choose not to act or are constrained by lack of resources. This restriction is inconsistent with other areas of workplace relations where unions have the ability to undertake compliance and enforcement actions, including prosecutions, as well as receive any penalties awarded.

A truly rights-based approach to health and safety requires that those most affected by workplace hazards, workers themselves and their representatives, be active partners in identifying risks, shaping solutions, and holding duty holders to account. Health and Safety Representatives (HSRs) and registered unions are central to ensuring that workers’ voices are heard and that health and safety laws are effectively implemented.

In our submission, we will make recommendations on how the rights of HSRs and unions can be strengthened in the model laws, to make the system more participatory, cooperative, transparent, and effective and better reflect and operationalise the objects of the model WHS Act.

The ACTU welcomes the Best Practice Review of the model Work Health and Safety laws and the opportunity to provide a formal submission. In preparing this submission, the ACTU has carefully considered the Discussion Paper and consulted with our affiliated unions.

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