A manager fell two storeys at 23 and lost his job before the ambulance reached him. What he says about the years afterwards lands on the same point as this year’s campaign theme, and on the paperwork residential builders are still missing.
Safe Work Australia has set the theme for this year’s National Safe Work Month, which runs across October, as Safe work is for life. The framing is deliberate. It puts work health and safety as something wider than preventing harm in the moment, and splits the month into four weekly focus areas covering why the duty matters, what it protects, its long term impact, and action across all workplaces.
The numbers underneath it are blunt. Safe Work Australia recorded 188 workers killed by traumatic injuries at work in 2024. Construction accounted for 37 of those deaths, one in five, and the third highest count of any industry.
The episode of The Good Builder Podcast released today arrives at the campaign’s premise from the opposite direction. Carrick O’Connell, national enterprise manager at safety systems provider HazardCo, spent most of an hour with Az talking about what happens after an incident rather than during one.
The incident takes a day. The consequences run for decades.
O’Connell opened with a builder he had presented to a few years earlier, who told him safety sat at the front of his business because his son had been killed on a site. The apprentice was on his second day, installing solar. He stood on a panel that had not been properly secured and fell through the roof.
“That kid’s parents are living with that for the rest of their lives,” O’Connell said. “So often, when we get health and safety wrong in our industry, the fallout is not necessarily just the impact of that day. It’s the impact across all the people involved in that incident over a long period of time.”
He has his own version. In his early twenties he installed aerials on roofs, paid per house, running four or five houses a day. A ladder slipped out from under him and he fell two storeys onto a concrete driveway. He broke vertebrae in his back, and a wrist he did not know about for a week because the pain medication masked it. He did not work for six months, and when he went back he could not return to site.
“The guy I was working for contacted an ambulance and then he sacked me. I actually had lost my job before the ambulance picked me up off the concrete.”
The harder part, on his account, was not the injury. “Twenty three years old, prime of my life, and then suddenly had a body of an old man.” Az put the operating logic in the terms builders use. Builders spin a thousand plates, and if one has to drop, do not drop health and safety.
A work health and safety management plan is required once construction work costs $250,000 or more
O’Connell’s read from the road is that the gap is rarely about intent. It is that builders do not always know which documents the law actually names. “In Queensland, legally you’re required to have a site specific safety plan on every job over 250,000,” he said. “A lot of builders I talk to don’t have those plans.”
Workplace Health and Safety Queensland sets the position out precisely. Where a business commissions construction work valued at $250,000 or more, that work is a construction project, and by default the commissioning party is the principal contractor. Another business can be appointed to the role by being authorised to have management or control of the workplace, and there can only ever be one at a time.
The principal contractor must prepare a written work health and safety management plan before work on the project starts. Work cannot begin unless the plan has been discussed with, or a copy given to, all relevant people and is available for inspection, and it must be reviewed and revised when the management of risks changes. Where a notifiable incident occurs, the plan must be kept for at least two years afterwards.
Site specific safety plan or WHS management plan
The term used on site is usually a site specific safety plan. The document named in the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011 is a work health and safety management plan, and it attaches to a construction project, meaning construction work costing $250,000 or more. Below that figure there is no construction project and no principal contractor can be appointed, but the primary duty of care under the Act still applies to every business on the job.
A safe work method statement is triggered by a two metre fall risk, not by the size of the job
The document O’Connell says goes missing most often is the safe work method statement. “On a residential building site, on a greenfield site, anyone that steps on a ladder has to have a SWMS,” he said. “Most of them don’t.”
The trigger is narrower than that, and worth carrying correctly. Workplace Health and Safety Queensland states that construction work involving the risk of a person falling more than two metres is high risk construction work requiring a safe work method statement, and that this applies to all construction work, housing included. A separate rule governs controls. Mandatory fall prevention or fall arrest measures attach at three metres in housing construction and two metres in other construction work, so a residential job can sit under the mandatory control height and still require a statement.
The obligation runs in both directions, which is where builders get caught. The business doing the high risk work must have a statement prepared before it starts, and the regulator states that the principal contractor must sign and date the statements received, keep them with the management plan and monitor whether they are being followed. That puts the statement inside the wider question of managing subcontractors in Australia rather than outside it.
Enforcement is pointed the same way. A joint Building Commission NSW and SafeWork NSW operation across the Hunter region returned unlicensed work and height safety as its headline concerns, with inspectors checking whether statements matched the work rather than whether a folder existed.
Psychosocial hazards now sit inside the same duty, and the resourcing shows it
The area O’Connell flagged as moving fastest was psychosocial risk. “Essentially what it means is that the builder can be held accountable for both the physical and mental health of people on site,” he said. He described a site where offensive graffiti aimed at the business’s health and safety manager, a woman well known to everyone on the job, was found during a safety walk. On his account the company’s sites were shut down until the workforce had been through psychosocial hazard training. A crude joke on a cupboard door became an operational event across a business.
The duty itself is not new. It sits in the model Work Health and Safety Regulations, and Queensland has had the Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice since 2022. What has changed is the capacity to enforce it. In March, SafeWork NSW deployed 20 psychosocial inspectors as part of 51 additional inspectors, which the agency described as its largest ever uplift. They bring backgrounds in psychology, anti bullying work and trauma informed practice, and they issue notices.
We have set out what the duty requires of a small building business in more detail, including why there is no size exemption and never has been.
October names the month, the duty runs the other eleven
Asked what makes a good builder, O’Connell went to leadership rather than paperwork. Someone who leads across the whole business, from how customers are dealt with through to how site managers and subcontractors are expected to work, and who is clear about how safety will be run. On his account none of the systems function without it, which puts safety in the same category as every other part of running a building business in Australia rather than in a compliance folder of its own.
Az’s challenge to the audience was narrower and had a date on it. National Safe Work Month opens a fortnight from today, and if builders trust what they hear on the podcast, do something about safety in October. The theme this year is about how long harm lasts. The documentation is about how long liability lasts. Both land in the same place, which is that the cheapest moment to deal with either is before anything has happened. That is also the moment nobody is thinking about it, and the whole reason a month with a name on it exists.
The Good Builder Take
The confronting part of this conversation was not the incidents. It was how ordinary the gaps are. A plan the law names and most of the industry calls something else. A statement triggered by a height most people guess at. Neither is expensive to fix, and neither is what anyone is thinking about on a busy Tuesday. That is exactly why October exists, and exactly why one month is not the answer.
The full conversation with Carrick O’Connell is on The Good Builder Podcast, out today.
Frequently asked questions
Where construction work is valued at $250,000 or more it is a construction project, and the principal contractor must prepare a written work health and safety management plan before work starts. Workplace Health and Safety Queensland states the plan must be discussed with or given to all relevant people, be available for inspection, and be reviewed and revised when the management of risks changes. Where a notifiable incident occurs in connection with the project, the plan must be kept for at least two years. Below the threshold the work is not a construction project and a principal contractor cannot be appointed.
It does where the work is high risk construction work. Workplace Health and Safety Queensland states that construction work involving the risk of a person falling more than two metres is high risk construction work requiring a safe work method statement, and that this applies to all construction work including housing construction. Mandatory fall prevention or fall arrest controls sit under a separate rule and attach at three metres in housing construction and two metres in other construction work.
Safe work is for life. Safe Work Australia runs the campaign each October and has split this year into four weekly focus areas: why work health and safety matters, what it protects, its long term impact, and action across all workplaces. The theme reflects the long term effect workplace harm has on workers, families, businesses and communities.
Yes. The duty to manage psychosocial risk sits in the model Work Health and Safety Regulations and applies regardless of the size of the business. Queensland has had the Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice since 2022. In March 2026 SafeWork NSW deployed 20 specialist psychosocial inspectors as part of 51 additional inspectors, the agency’s largest ever increase to its inspectorate.
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Last updated: 16 September 2026.
General information only. This article describes published regulator guidance and the model work health and safety framework. It does not constitute legal or work health and safety advice, and obligations differ between states and territories. Businesses should obtain qualified guidance specific to their own jurisdiction and circumstances.
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