Six Warnings in Five Months: The Near Misses Before the Questacon Burns

On 23 July 2022, a nine-year-old visitor at Questacon used alcohol-based hand sanitiser supplied by the centre, touched a plasma globe and suffered second degree burns when their hands caught fire. On 24 September 2026 the Department of Industry, Science and Resources pleaded guilty in the ACT Magistrates Court to a Category 2 offence under the Commonwealth WHS Act and was fined $140,000. The detail that stopped me was this one. It was the sixth incident involving the plasma globes in five months, including a sanitiser spark near miss in February 2022.

Six incidents. One of them was almost exactly the injury that came later. That is not a failure to foresee a risk. It is a failure to act on a risk that had already announced itself.

The Duty Nobody Thinks About Until a Visitor Is Hurt

The second case in this week's brief is about the public too. On 4 July 2023, an e-bike rider in Eastwood Avenue, Eastwood hit the unfeathered edge of a steel road plate that NSW Kerbing had laid over a stormwater trench. The rider suffered skull fractures and died on 26 July. The company was fined $225,000 after a 25% discount for its plea. The court noted the hazard was obvious, the council had raised it that same day and the controls were cheap: feathering the plate edges, signage and lighting.

Both cases turn on the duty to other persons. Under the model WHS laws, your duty doesn't stop at your workers. It extends to visitors, customers, students, passers-by and anyone else whose health and safety is affected by how you run your business. I find many businesses understand this in principle and then design their safety systems entirely around employees.

Ask Yourself About Your Warning Signs

• Do your incident and near miss reports include events involving the public or visitors? Or only staff?
• When a near miss is reported, does someone ask "what would this have looked like if it went worse?"
• If the same piece of equipment or the same location appears in more than one report, does anything trigger a review?
• When an outside party like a council, a client or a neighbour raises a hazard, who records it and who decides what to do?
• Have you looked at your worksite from the footpath, the road or the car park, not just from inside the fence?

Near Misses Are Free Lessons

The brief summed up Questacon in a way I agree with. Near misses are the warning. The duty to control the risk starts with the first one. A near miss is the cheapest safety information you will ever get. Nobody is hurt and the cause is still fresh. The only cost is the effort to take it seriously.

The trouble is that near misses involving the public often go unrecorded. A visitor gets a small shock and walks away. A cyclist wobbles over a plate edge and keeps riding. Staff may not see these as incidents because no worker was involved. That is exactly how six warnings can pass without a change.

One Thing to Do This Week

Pull your last twelve months of incident and near miss reports. Sort them by location or piece of equipment. Look for anything that appears twice or more. Then check whether the people affected included anyone who doesn't work for you. If they did, ask what control changed after the first report.

How many warnings has your workplace already given you about the next person who will get hurt there?