Falls From Heights: Still the Most Preventable Fatality in Australian Workplaces
I have been in safety long enough to know that some problems should have been solved by now, and falls from heights is one of them. Every time I open the SafeWork NSW prosecution records, I see it again; a worker fell, sometimes they survived, sometimes they did not and almost every time there was something straightforward that could have stopped it. A guardrail, a timely inspection, someone taking a few extra minutes to set up properly before going up. That is what makes this one hard to stomach. It is not complicated. We know how to prevent falls. The tools exist, the knowledge exists and yet the cases keep coming.
What I Am Seeing in the Court Records
In the past two years alone, NSW courts have handed down convictions for fall-related incidents with fines of $600,000, $300,000, $225,000, $135,000 and more. These are not giant corporations with legal teams on retainer; they are builders, roofing contractors, fit-out companies, and civil contractors, businesses that look a lot like the ones we work with every day. And the injuries and fatalities span construction, warehousing, agriculture, and facilities maintenance, so if your people work at height in any capacity, this is relevant to you.
Why It Keeps Happening
When I dig into what actually went wrong in these cases, the same patterns come up over and over. The job was supposed to be quick; someone needed to check something, fix something, grab something from up high, and because it was only going to take a few minutes, the decision was made to skip the protection. I have seen this thinking more times than I can count, and it is one of the most dangerous assumptions in any workplace because falls do not care how long the task takes.
Scaffold that was incomplete or overdue for inspection was still being accessed, and the requirements around that exist for good reason because scaffold fails. On active construction sites, edge protection comes down to complete a piece of work and then someone else accesses the area before it goes back up, and that gap is where people get hurt. Then there are the situations that never appeared in any risk assessment because they were not planned; workers using ladders as platforms, standing on upturned buckets, improvising in the moment when they needed to reach something and did not want to go and get the right equipment.
The other thing I keep seeing is young workers in situations that more experienced people would have pushed back on, either because they did not recognise the risk or because they did not feel they could say something. That is a culture problem as much as it is a systems problem, and it is one worth paying attention to.
What the Law Actually Requires
Under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, businesses must manage the risk of falls so far as is reasonably practicable, and the regulations get specific about work at 2 metres or above. The hierarchy is clear: eliminate the need to work at height where you can, use passive systems like guardrails and edge protection as your primary control, and only rely on harnesses when there is genuinely no better option. In court, the question is whether what the business did was reasonably practicable given what was known about the risk, and a business with no edge protection, no fall prevention training, and no inspection records is going to have a very hard time answering that. The fines in the $150,000 to $600,000 range for these incidents are not outliers anymore, they are becoming the norm, and that is before you factor in the human cost, which is the part I never want anyone to lose sight of.
Questions Worth Asking in Your Business
If you are responsible for a workplace where people work at height, I would start by asking whether you have actually mapped every task that involves height, not just the obvious planned ones but the routine tasks too; accessing roof areas, working on loading docks, inspecting elevated plant. If you have not mapped them, you cannot manage them. From there, I would look at whether your controls are right for the risk, because guardrails and edge protection should always come first and harnesses should be the last resort, not the default. They require training, proper anchorage points, and inspection, and treating them as a shortcut is a risk in itself.
It is also worth checking whether your scaffold is actually being inspected on time and whether the records exist to prove it, and whether there is a clear procedure for when edge protection needs to come down temporarily, rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be on site that day. And if your younger or newer workers are not being actively supervised by someone who knows what right looks like, not just inducted, actually supervised, that is a gap worth closing.
The last thing I would ask is whether your workers are raising concerns, and if they are not, why. Sometimes everything is genuinely fine. More often, people do not feel safe speaking up, and that is worth understanding regardless of what your incident record looks like.
Falls from heights are not unsolvable. Every case I have read in those prosecution records involved a gap that could have been closed, not with a massive investment or a complicated system, but with the right controls properly applied and someone making sure they were actually working. That is what I want for every workplace I work with; people doing their job and going home at the end of the day. If you want to work through where your height safety is at and what needs attention, reach out, because that is exactly what we are here for.
Glen
