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 the second workplace manslaughter conviction handed down in Victoria since the offence began on 1 July 2020.

A few days later, Rodrigues Transport was fined $330,000 after a driver fell from the tailgate of a delivery truck and died from his injuries sixteen days later. The guard rails that were meant to be fitted had been removed because workers found them heavy and awkward. The judge called the departure from safety standards inexplicable.

Two different industries. Two different types of fall. The same root cause. Someone removed the protection, or never installed it, and decided the job could be done safely anyway.

If you own or manage a commercial building, you already carry a weight of responsibility most people never see. You are accountable for the roof, for the trades who work on it, for the compliance paperwork, and increasingly, for decisions you may not even have made yourself. Reading about a director facing a multi million dollar fine for something that happened on someone else’s watch is not an abstract worry. It is the exact scenario every facilities manager pictures when they sign off on roof access.

That is the internal pressure. The philosophical problem sits underneath it. Every person who climbs onto your roof to clear a drain, service a unit, or remove a panel deserves to come home at the end of the day. That is not a compliance slogan. It is the entire point of height safety.

We understand the pressure building owners and facilities managers are under, because we see the gap between what should be on a roof and what actually is on a roof more often than most. A roof with no anchor points, or anchor points nobody has touched since installation, looks identical to a compliant one from the ground. The difference only shows up the day someone needs to use it.

Our work starts with assessing how your trades actually need to get onto the roof and what they need to do once they are there. For something like panel removal or routine maintenance near a roof edge, that usually means a combination of certified anchor points, static lines for horizontal movement, and edge protection where the work happens near an unguarded perimeter. Every system we design and install is built to AS/NZS 1891 and AS 1657, and every anchor point is tested and certified, not assumed safe because it has always been there.

Height safety systems are not a one off purchase. AS 1891.4 sets out recertification intervals, and a system that was compliant five years ago may already be sitting on an outdated pull test standard. We assess, install, certify and maintain the infrastructure that gives your trades safe access. We do not carry out the roof maintenance itself. That is for your contractors to do, safely, once we have made the access genuinely safe for them. Our documentation tells every tradesperson exactly what equipment is on your roof, what it is rated for, and when it was last inspected, so they arrive prepared instead of guessing.

Picture the version of this where it goes right. Your contractor turns up, checks the documentation, clips onto a certified anchor point, finishes the job, and goes home. You have a paper trail that shows exactly what was in place and when it was last checked. Nobody’s name ends up in a court judgment.

Now picture the other version. The anchor point was never installed, or was installed once and never recertified, or the edge protection was removed because it got in the way. A worker falls. The investigation that follows does not ask whether you meant well. It asks what you knew, what you should have known, and what you did about it. Risham Nominees and Rodrigues Transport are this year’s answer to that question, and it cost them $3.4 million and $330,000.

If you are not confident your roof access would hold up to that same question, now is the time to find out, not after something has gone wrong. Call us on 03 9555 3586, email sales@anchored.com.au or visit anchored.com.au to get your roof properly assessed.