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# Fewer Prosecutions, Record Penalties: What a Serious WHS Breach Now Costs
- URL: https://www.whsbrief.com/fewer-prosecutions-record-penalties-what-a-serious-whs-breach-now-costs/
- Published: 2026-10-01T23:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T23:30:00.000Z
- Description: Safe Work Australia's data shows prosecutions falling while average penalties hit a record. This month's sentences show why.
- Author: WHS Brief
- Tags: blog

Safe Work Australia's updated prosecutions dashboard, released on 1 September 2026, shows something that looks contradictory at first glance. The total number of work health and safety prosecutions fell in 2025\. The average court-imposed penalty climbed to its highest level on record.

Fewer cases, bigger fines. I think that combination says more about where WHS enforcement is heading than any single headline case does.

### What the Last Month of Sentences Looks Like

This week's brief carried a run of sentencing outcomes that shows the trend in practice. In Queensland, a Chinchilla heavy vehicle repair business was fined $550,000 and its sole director $100,000 over the death of a 16-year-old apprentice. A public pool operator was fined $575,000 after a five-year-old drowned while no lifeguard roamed the indoor pool for at least 13 minutes; that decision is under appeal. In NSW, Woodward Foods Australia Pty Ltd was fined $375,000 after a worker was seriously injured on a grain mill. Lynch Contractors Pty Ltd was fined $240,000 over a conveyor entanglement at Mt Magometon Quarry near Coonamble.

None of those involved industrial manslaughter charges. They are ordinary section 32 and section 19 matters. Ordinary is now expensive.

### Why Penalties Are Rising

Part of the answer sits in Queensland's appellate courts. The Brisbane Magistrates Court applied Nicholson v GCMR Project Services \[2025\] QCA 242 when sentencing an air conditioning company after a subcontracted worker fell 3.7 metres through an unguarded skylight. That decision is about penalties bearing a reasonable relationship to the statutory maximum. When maximums have risen sharply and courts are told to take them seriously, the average moves.

The other part is selection. If regulators are prosecuting fewer matters, they are choosing the ones with the clearest failures and the worst outcomes. Those cases attract the heaviest sentences.

### The Penalties That Aren't Money

Three details from this week's cases deserve more attention than the dollar figures:

- **The adverse publicity order against Woodward Foods.** The court required the company to publicise its offence. In my experience that is the penalty element boards notice more than the fine, because it lands on the brand rather than the budget.
- **The discount for pleading early.** Justice Babb set Lynch Contractors' starting figure at $320,000 and reduced it to $240,000 for the early plea. How a business responds after an incident still shapes the outcome.
- **The conviction recorded against the Chinchilla director personally.** That follows a person, not a company.

### Ask Yourself as a Director or Senior Manager

- Do you know what a serious breach in your industry now costs, based on actual sentencing data rather than the maximum in the Act?
- Has your board ever looked at the Safe Work Australia prosecutions dashboard, which covers criminal prosecutions from 1 January 2020?
- Would your organisation cope with an adverse publicity order better or worse than a six-figure fine?
- If something went wrong tomorrow, is there a plan for how you would respond to the regulator in the first weeks?

Lynch Contractors' list of failures is worth reading slowly: absent guarding, emergency stops that were never verified, bypassed lanyard stop circuits and inadequate maintenance records. None of those are expensive to fix compared to $240,000 plus costs. Most prosecutions look like that in hindsight.

If you priced your biggest uncontrolled risk against this year's sentencing data, would you still leave it on next year's budget?