Anchored Height Safety

A first-year apprentice was installing solar panels on a roof in Noble Park, about 2.7 metres above the ground, with nothing there to stop a fall. They did not fall. Nobody was hurt. Their employer was still fined $40,000. That is the part worth considering. No one was injured, no one went to hospital, and the penalty landed anyway. A WorkSafe inspector turned up during the job, saw an apprentice exposed to a serious fall, and that was enough. The company pleaded guilty to failing to provide a safe workplace, was convicted at Heidelberg Magistrates' Court on 6 August 2026, [...]

Four workers spent up to four hours each on a scaffold that a safety regulator had already shut down. None of them knew it was defective, and none of them knew they were not meant to be up there at all. That is what SafeWork SA found on a residential building site at Salisbury East. Inspectors had already attended the site after a complaint and identified serious defects in the perimeter scaffold, including missing kickboards, excessive gaps in the walkways and unsafe access. They issued a prohibition notice, which ordered all access to the scaffold to stop until the defects [...]