Industrial manslaughter laws
The issue of criminal responsibility for workplace deaths has generated debate in NSW and nationally for many years. In October 2023, the NSW Government announced that it would introduce an industrial manslaughter offence in the first half of 2024, with severe penalties for serious work health and safety breaches that result in death. The purpose of this paper is to put the proposed reforms in their current and historical context. The paper discusses the general criminal offence of manslaughter, outlines the key offences in current work health and safety laws, summarises the debate, and examines industrial manslaughter laws in other Australian jurisdictions.
Lenny Roth, BCom, LLB
Research Team Leader, Parliamentary Research Service
Research Paper 2, 2024
Read the paper
Key points
- In October 2023, the NSW Government announced that it would introduce industrial manslaughter laws with severe penalties for serious work health and safety breaches that result in death.
- In the general criminal law, there is an offence of manslaughter by criminal negligence, which has a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment. In NSW, it appears that there has only been one successful prosecution of this offence in the context of a workplace death.
- The most serious offence in the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) is the Category 1 offence of engaging in conduct with gross negligence or recklessness that exposes an individual to a risk of death or serious injury or illness. The maximum penalty is 5 years imprisonment for an individual and a fine of $4 million for a corporation. From 1 July 2024, the maximum penalty will increase to 10 years imprisonment for an individual and $10.4 million for a corporation.
- Since 2012, there have been 4 successful prosecutions of Category 1 offences in NSW – all involved a corporation rather than an individual. The maximum penalty imposed for this offence was a fine of $2.025 million.
- In 2018 a Senate committee report on industrial deaths and a national review of work health and safety laws recommended introducing a new offence of industrial manslaughter. In contrast, Safe Work Australia’s 2019 advice to ministers did not recommend introducing this offence.
- The main argument for industrial manslaughter laws is that existing offences are inadequate for deterring and punishing grossly negligent safety breaches that result in a workplace death. Critics of these laws argue that existing offences are sufficient and that enacting new outcome-based offences interferes with the risk-based preventative framework of work health and safety laws.
- Since 2017, 6 states and territories have introduced industrial manslaughter offences into their work health and safety laws. These offences are similar to the Category 1 offence but only apply where there has been a workplace death and have much higher maximum penalties such as 25 years imprisonment.
- Since 2017, it appears that there have been 4 successful prosecutions for industrial manslaughter in other states and territories. Two of these cases have been finalised. In one, an individual was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment, suspended after 18 months; and in the other a corporation was fined $3 million.
Published: 19 January 2024