Industrial manslaughter laws in Australia were supposed to be a turning point. Enacted first in Queensland in 2017, they promised to hold employers accountable when their gross negligence led to the death of a worker. With penalties ranging from multimillion-dollar fines to prison sentences, they carried the weight of justice long overdue. Yet, years later, what should have been a reckoning for workplace safety has become a story of missed marks, hollow victories, and troubling trends.
The legal charge of industrial manslaughter is no small matter. It requires prosecutors to prove beyond reasonable doubt that an employer’s recklessness or neglect directly caused a worker’s death—a high threshold, and rightly so. This isn’t about simple errors or accidents; it’s about failures so grave they warrant criminal liability. Yet in the handful of cases brought to trial, the weight of the law has fallen disproportionately on small businesses, not the corporate titans it was meant to challenge.
Successful prosecution
Take Brisbane Auto Recycling, the first successful prosecution under these laws. A worker was crushed by a reversing forklift, and the directors received suspended sentences while the company was fined $3 million. Or Jeffrey Owen, a small Queensland business owner whose negligence resulted in a young worker’s death. Owen was sentenced to five years in prison, a headline-grabbing punishment, though the sentence was wholly suspended after 18 months. Similar cases in Victoria and Western Australia followed the same pattern: devastating losses of life, but convictions targeting small operators ill-equipped to navigate complex safety laws.
Meanwhile, in the boardrooms of Australia’s corporate giants, the response has been perverse. Directors and executives, instead of confronting the real risks their workers face, are building fortresses of paper compliance. They drown their operations in policies, audits, and glossy safety reports designed to shield themselves from liability. It’s a cynical, self-serving exercise that shifts focus away from the factory floor, the construction site, or the mine—where real dangers lurk.
These are not leaders acting in the spirit of the law; they are bureaucrats protecting their hides. The lives of workers, the very people the laws are meant to protect, become secondary to the appearance of compliance.
And then there are the unions, quick to grandstand and demand industrial manslaughter charges after every workplace fatality. Their calls may resonate with grieving families and the public, but they ignore the reality of the law.
Legal Threshold
Not every tragic death will meet the stringent legal threshold for industrial manslaughter. Reckless demands for prosecutions in cases that don’t fit the law’s criteria dilute its impact and risk turning a powerful tool for justice into a blunt instrument for political theater. Unions should focus on preventing workplace deaths through real, systemic change rather than chasing headlines.
Industrial manslaughter laws are working in the narrowest sense: they are securing convictions and punishing negligence. But they are also failing. They disproportionately target small businesses, let large corporations off the hook, and encourage a culture of paperwork over genuine risk control. Worse, they are wielded as rhetorical weapons by unions that sometimes prioritize public outrage over meaningful reform.
This isn’t justice. Justice means holding the powerful accountable, not letting them hide behind documentation. Justice means a culture of safety, not one of cover-ups and scapegoats. For these laws to truly honor the lives they aim to protect, they must be applied with rigor, fairness, and a focus on the systemic failures that allow workplace deaths to happen in the first place. Anything less is a betrayal of their purpose.
Learn More: My sources are your sources (except the confidential ones): Worksafe Queensland, Kennedys, Worksafe Victoria, Couriel Mail, plus Australian court records and Hall & Wilcox case analysis, Australian Law Journal, and Worksafe Western Australia websites.)
