The Queensland Parliament has passed a bill making amendments to the Resources Safety Act, improving legislation for safety and health across the state’s resources industry.
The reforms facilitate high reliability organisation behaviours within the resources sector, modernising regulatory enforcement powers, and ensuring Queensland’s resources safety and health legislation is contemporary and effective.
Critical controls are a particular focus and aim to address serious risks on mine sites.
Previously, these controls have been voluntarily applied across industry. The new laws now require mine and quarry sites to include critical controls in their safety and health management systems.
The changes also mean enforceable undertakings have been introduced for the first time to the resources industry.
An enforceable undertaking is an alternative to prosecution and allows the regulator to accept an undertaking from individuals and companies where they have breached the safety and health legislation, but not in matters involving workplace deaths.
As part of the legislation, Resources Safety and Health Queensland’s petroleum and gas inspectors will now be able to compel relevant people to give information or answer questions.
Queensland Minister for Resources and Critical Minerals, Scott Stewart, said that the most important thing to come out of out of any workplace at the end of each shift is its workers, which is why safety is his number one priority.
“Our goal for these reforms was to improve the resource sector’s safety and health performance and to reduce the number of fatalities and serious accidents,” Mr Stewart said.
“This legislation implements the final recommendations for Resources Safety and Health Queensland which is incredibly important.
“The resources industry is a key driver of the Queensland economy, but we can’t have a thriving resources sector without robust safety measures in place.”
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