WHS Compliance Checklist

Where the duties come from

Work health and safety in Australia runs on model laws developed by Safe Work Australia and enacted (with variations) by each state and territory. If you run a business, you're a PCBU — a person conducting a business or undertaking — and you owe a primary duty of care to workers and anyone affected by the work. That duty can't be contracted away, and it covers contractors and labour hire as well as employees. Your state or territory WHS regulator publishes the specific requirements that apply to you; this page is a general orientation, not legal advice.

Foundations

• Identify your regulator and the codes of practice for your industry — codes of practice are the practical benchmark regulators and courts use to judge what was reasonably practicable.
• Write a WHS policy proportionate to your risk — a landscaping crew and a bookkeeping firm need very different documents; what matters is that it reflects your actual work.
• Confirm workers compensation insurance is in place — it's compulsory once you employ, and it's arranged through your state or territory scheme, each with its own rules.
• Make officers' due diligence explicit — directors and officers have a personal duty to exercise due diligence on WHS; minute it, don't assume it.

Hazards and risk

• Keep a live risk register — identify hazards, assess them, apply controls using the hierarchy of controls (eliminate first, PPE last), and review when anything changes.
• Include psychosocial hazards — workload, bullying, isolation and poor role clarity are now explicitly regulated hazards under the model framework, not optional extras.
• Cover the unglamorous recurring items — electrical testing, first aid kit contents and trained first aiders, emergency plan and evacuation drills, plant and equipment maintenance records.
• Assess new work before it starts — new equipment, new site, new chemical, new process: each is a trigger for a fresh look, not an annual event.

People and process

• Consult workers on WHS matters — consultation is a legal duty, not a courtesy; keep simple records showing it happened.
• Induct every new starter and every contractor — and keep the signed record, because an induction you can't evidence may as well not have happened.
• Set up incident reporting people will actually use — near-misses are free lessons; a blame-heavy process buries them.
• Know your notification duties — certain serious incidents must be reported to the regulator immediately and the scene preserved; check your regulator's current definition of a notifiable incident before you ever need it.
• Manage return to work properly — injured workers are entitled to a structured return-to-work process under your state scheme, and handling it well is usually what keeps premiums contained.

Keeping it alive

• Put WHS on a standing review cadence — a quarterly walk-through of the register, training records and open actions beats an annual panic before an audit.
• Assign every action an owner and a date — a hazard noted with no owner is a liability you've documented against yourself.

Safety systems fail the same way other back-office systems fail: they depend on one person's memory. If your WHS records live in the founder's head or inbox, that's a founder dependency problem wearing a safety hat — treat it as part of building capable people systems across the business.