The core objective of the national WHS harmonisation project was to create a single, predictable regulatory environment for multi-state employers. Central to this strategy was the roll-out of uniform model Codes of Practice. However, in July 2014, Safe Work Australia (SWA) executed a significant policy shift that highlights the deep political and operational friction still embedded within the national safety framework.
Following an explicit directive from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to reduce compliance burdens and red tape, SWA abandoned the elevation of nine highly anticipated draft model Codes of Practice. These frameworks covered critical, high-risk sectors including scaffolding, forklifts, formwork, and workplace traffic management. Instead of being legislated as official legal benchmarks, these documents have been downgraded to non-binding national guidance information packages.
The evidentiary gap for safety practitioners
This shift creates an immediate operational challenge for safety leaders navigating compliance. Under Section 275 of the model Work Health and Safety Act, an approved Code of Practice holds a distinct legal status in a court of law. If an inspector issues an improvement notice or a prosecutor initiates a case, a court can rely on an approved Code as an objective benchmark of what is reasonably practicable to control a specific hazard.
| Regulatory Format | Statutory Status | Evidentiary Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Approved Code of Practice | Legally recognized benchmark under Section 275 of the WHS Act. | Automatically admissible as evidence of an industry standard. Shifts the burden to the employer to prove an equal or better control was used. |
| Guidance Information Package | Non-binding advisory material consisting of guides and info sheets. | Holds highly variable legal weight. The regulator or prosecutor must independently prove the safety baseline in court via expert testimony. |
By transitioning these frameworks into guidance packages, the regulatory landscape fragments. Because these packages are merely non-binding templates, individual state jurisdictions retain full independent sovereignty to break ranks. Multi-state employers must now deal with a complex setup where some states may choose to maintain or formally adopt specialized local codes, while others rely on vague, non-binding guidance.
This demands that safety managers look past generic guidance and ensure their internal engineering standards match or exceed the highest published technical specifications across the country, regardless of their local regulatory status.
Source material & further reading
- Regulatory Statement: Safe Work Australia, Decisions on Model WHS Codes of Practice (Guidance material release, July 2014).
- Government Policy: Council of Australian Governments (COAG), Inaugural Deregulation Agenda and Red Tape Reduction Review (May 2014).
- Statutory Reference: Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Cth), Section 275 (Admissibility of approved codes of practice).
