Request A QuoteMark Anderson
What Your Insurer Really Wants From Your Roof (And Why Height Safety Matters More Than You Think)
The building maintenance you sign off on each year and the insurance renewal that lands on your desk are more closely connected than they first appear. One keeps the building safe and running. The other prices the risk of it not being. What sits between them is the simple question of whether anyone can get onto the roof to do the work.
Your Rooftop Needs a Map Reference
For those who grew up in Melbourne before the rise of mobile digital technology, Melways map coordinates could get you anywhere.You would haul the Melways off the back seat, flip through those worn pages until you hit the right one, then run your finger down and across the grid squares. There it was. Your destination, the Melways got you there every time. A grid reference did something simple. It gave you context. You knew where you were, what sat around you, and how to reach the thing you were looking for. Flip, find, go. Most building owners do not have [...]
The Surface You Trust Is the One That Fails
Two workers stepped onto surfaces they trusted to hold them. Both surfaces gave way, and both times someone hit the ground hard. These were not freak accidents. In one recent case, a building renovator was convicted and fined $90,000 in the Industrial Court of NSW after two workers fell at least 2.5 metres when a concrete garage roof collapsed during demolition work. In another, a carpentry business was fined $120,000 after a worker fell about six metres when a ceiling joist gave way beneath them. Both businesses pleaded guilty. Both incidents left workers injured. Both were preventable. The problem on [...]
Are You Choosing a Height Safety Provider for the Right Reasons, or Just Ticking a Box?
Height safety used to be the last thing anyone thought about. It came up when a contractor handed you a SWMS, or when someone flicked through a JSA before climbing onto your roof. The rest of the time it sat in a drawer. That world has changed. Every asset on your roof, the air conditioning, the solar, the exhaust fans, the antennas, needs to be maintained, and it needs to be maintained safely. Height safety is no longer a topic you check at the last minute. It is part of the workflow that keeps the whole building running. The trouble [...]
The Cheaper Roof Access Option That Can Cost You More Than a Walkway
You own a large warehouse. The air conditioning needs a service and the solar array needs a clean, so a tradesperson has to walk across a wide steel roof lined with long rows of skylights. Someone has quoted you a horizontal lifeline as the cheaper way to get them there, and on paper it looks like a smart saving. Here is the problem with that saving. A horizontal lifeline, or HLL, and a walkway with skylight mesh are not a budget version and a premium version of the same fix. They solve the problem in completely different ways, and only [...]
Why We Install Osprey Crane Systems: Lessons From a $3.4 Million Manslaughter Conviction
A worker is told to do the job safely. No anchor point, no static line, nothing to connect to. That is the entire safety system, and in 2021 it cost a worker his life on a concrete warehouse floor. In June 2026, Risham Nominees Pty Ltd was fined $3.4 million in the Victorian Supreme Court for workplace manslaughter after worker Jassim Al Shadori fell 4.5 metres onto concrete while removing roof panels at the company's Reservoir warehouse. Justice Jacinta Forbes found the fall risk was readily foreseeable, and that the company director should have recognised it. Workers had no fall [...]
Six Years of Workplace Manslaughter Laws, and the Bill Is Still Coming Due
Six years ago, Victoria introduced workplace manslaughter laws. This year, those laws caught up with two more employers, and between them the bill came to nearly $3.75 million. In June, Risham Nominees, the company behind Centenary Bakehouse, was fined $3.4 million after a worker fell 4.5 metres while removing panels from the roof of their Reservoir warehouse. He died at the scene. The court found the risk was readily foreseeable and that the company's director should have known it. The workers were told to do the job safely. They were not given any actual instruction on how. It is only [...]
Why Letting the Window Cleaner Certify Your Anchor Points Leaves a Gap
The window cleaner abseils off your roof twice a year, checks the anchor points they use, and signs them off. On paper your building looks covered. Then the air conditioning technician, the plumber, or the facade engineer turns up, needs a point on the other side of the roof, and finds it was never assessed at all. This is one of the most common gaps we see, and it is easy to miss because nothing looks wrong. When a rope-access crew self-certifies the points they hang off, they only check the ones they need. They are not assessing the anchor [...]
The Recertification That Slips Through the Cracks Until You Need It
The external works are booked. The crew is on its way. Then someone checks the paperwork and the anchor points were never recertified, so the job cannot go ahead. Now you are scrambling, the trade is rebooking, and a committee is asking why nobody caught it. This is one of the quiet risks of looking after rooftops across a portfolio. Height safety recertification is not a one-off. Anchor points, static lines, and the systems that let people work near an edge need to be inspected and recertified on a regular cycle, and that obligation rolls around every single year, building [...]
Why Your New Building’s Roof Access Was Never Designed for Maintenance
The roof of your new building looks impressive on handover day. Davit arms, diversion points, anchor points, walkways. Tens of thousands of dollars of equipment sitting up there, signed off and handed to you in a neat document pack. Then a few years pass, a trade needs to get up there, and you find out half of it does not do what you thought it did. Here is what most people are never told. The access system on a new building was put there for the builders. It was designed to get the facade on and the structure finished, then [...]
Doing the Right Thing Is Not a Tagline. It Is How We Work
A lot of businesses talk about their commitment to doing things right. Fewer actually build it into how they operate day to day. The height safety industry has a straightforward job to do: keep workers safe when they work at height. But how a business shows up beyond the job site says as much about its values as the quality of its installations. When we look around our industry, we see plenty of businesses who do good work on site and then send everything else to landfill without a second thought. We have never been comfortable with that. For building [...]
A SWMS Is Not a Safety System
In February 2024, a young person on work experience fell through a skylight on a Melbourne rooftop. The fall was more than three and a half metres. They are now living with paraplegia. A Safe Work Method Statement existed. Multiple, in fact. Not a single fall protection measure was in place when they needed one. The roofing company involved, Bowitt Group trading as Melbourne Commercial Roofing, was convicted in the Moorabbin Magistrates Court in May 2026 and fined $55,000 plus costs. The sole trader who had engaged the injured person was separately fined $50,000 the previous December. More than $105,000 [...]
