Safe Work Australia updates WHS prosecutions dashboard

To reflect the latest publicly available data from 2024, Safe Work Australia (SWA) has updated the WHS prosecutions dashboard; functionality of the dashboard has also been enhanced by adding the ability to filter the data by industry.

About the dashboard

Developed in response to the 2018 Senate inquiry report — titled ‘They never came home – the framework surrounding the prevention, investigation and prosecution of industrial deaths in Australia’ — the dashboard provides national information on criminal prosecutions for breaching WHS laws or regulations since 1 January 2020 and can help inform decision-making to improve WHS outcomes.

Key insights and findings

From the 2024 WHS prosecutions dashboard, key insights and findings include the following:

• 317 prosecutions were recorded, reflecting a continued yearly increase.
• Construction, manufacturing, and transport, postal and warehousing were the top three industries involved in WHS prosecutions cases, at 47%, 21% and 5%, respectively.
• 49% of prosecutions cases involved a serious injury while 16% involved a fatal injury.
• A financial penalty resulted in 97% of prosecutions cases.
• There was an average financial penalty per case decrease since 2023, averaging $116,979 compared to $138,724 in 2023.

The dashboard and future updates

The new data is available to explore on SWA’s interactive data website, Our Data. Your Stories, with future updates to the WHS prosecutions data dashboard to be released annually.

Image credit: iStock.com/gorodenkoff. Stock image used is for illustrative purposes only.