Work Health & Safety Law and Policy 3e - eBook

The third edition of Work Health and Safety Law and Policy continues to provide a plain English approach to explaining and analysing the law which regulates work health and safety in Australia. Providing broad coverage, this book focuses on the role that legal regulation plays in preventing work-related injury and disease, as well as the way in which the law contributes to rehabilitating and compensating injured and ill workers.

This third edition focuses on the national model Work Health and Safety Bill 2009. The provisions of the model Bill are outlined, along with court decisions and other documentation that help interpret the provisions in new legislation enacting the model Bill. There is also a chapter in the book examining the national model Work Health and Safety Regulations 2011, and model codes of practice. The book includes three chapters on common law, statutory workers’ compensation provisions and rehabilitation. Tables summarising the key legal provisions of the major Australian Commonwealth, State and Territory workers’ compensation statutes have been updated and give quick and easy reference to points of legislation. The book also covers legal instruments outside of the work health and safety and workers’ compensation statutes that are relevant to understanding work health and safety law and policy.

This important book considers these legal principles in their many contexts – historical, social, political and economic – and encourages readers to apply legislation and case law in a variety of ways. This approach supports an understanding of the subject as an evolving regulatory response to complex social processes and policy concerns, rather than as a fixed set of rules.

In the third edition of this well-established work, principal author Professor Richard Johnstone has been joined by leading work health and safety scholar Dr Elizabeth Bluff and workers’ compensation expert Associate Professor Alan Clayton.

Contents

1. Work Health and Safety in Australia: An Overview
2. The Historical Development of the Law Regulation Work-related Injury, Disease and Death
3. The Harmonisation of Australian Work Health and Safety Regulation: Framework, Key Concepts and Institutions
4. Standard Setting: The General Duty of a Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking
5. Standard Setting: The Other General Duties
6. Standard Setting: Regulations, Codes of Practice and Other Standards
7. Work Health and Safety, Industrial Relations, and Workers’ Participation and Rights
8. State Enforcement of Work Health and Safety Statutory Standards
9. Common Law Compensation for Work-related Injury, Disease and Death
10. Workers’ Compensation
11. Rehabilitation and Return to Work

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From: Ethos December 2012

Reviewed by:  Clare Besemeres, CEA Technologies

Practitioners of work health and safety (WHS) law will be only too aware that this area of law is clouded with uncertainty following the implementation, in a number of jurisdictions, of the Model Work Health and Safety Acts and Regulations.  The authors of this text gamely attempt to predict how the harmonized regime will operate, but theirs is necessarily a somewhat speculative exercise.

The book examines the model WHS legislation and discusses court decisions that may influence its interpretation.  The authors also frequently reference recommendations contained in the Reports arising out of the National Review into Model Occupational Health and Safety Laws, including some which were not ultimately adopted – such as the recommendation that the model WHS Act require persons conducting a business or undertaking to employ or engage a suitably qualified person to provide advice on WHS matters. There are useful discussions of key concepts such as “worker”, “reasonably practicable” and “officer”.

While the focus of the book is on the model WHS legislation, the authors place this new regime in a broader context.  There are chapters devoted to the historical development of the law relating to work related injury, disease and death, to the employee’s common law action in negligence against the employer, and to the myriad of workers’ compensation systems operating in Australia.

This book is intended primarily as a resource for university students, but will be of value to practitioners in this area as well. It is to be hoped that a revised edition will issue once the process of harmonization has progressed further and there is some case law to bridge the gap between the old OHS world and the new, WHS regime.

Product Reviews

• Ethos, December 2012 [PDF 162580]
• Law Institute Journal, December 2012 [PDF 92440]