Industrial manslaughter is now law in all nine WHS jurisdictions. No two penalty regimes match.

For a safety manager operating across state lines, industrial manslaughter is the sharpest example of a fact this masthead will keep returning to: Australia does not have one WHS law, it has nine, and they move at nine speeds. The offences share a common skeleton. In every jurisdiction the accused must hold a WHS duty, must be a PCBU or an officer, must have breached the duty in a way that caused a death, and must have done so with gross negligence or recklessness. What differs is everything else: when the offence arrived, what it is called, and what it costs.

The table

Industrial manslaughter offences by jurisdiction, as at 5 July 2026. Dollar maxima are as expressed by each regulator or department on the cited page, with that page's date where given; jurisdictions that legislate in penalty units move with indexation, so the dollar figures are not directly comparable across rows.

The dates tell their own story. One offence existed before 2017 (the ACT's, in its Crimes Act from 2004, largely untested and moved into its WHS Act in 2021). Then Queensland in 2017, three more by 2022, and finally a pile-up: four jurisdictions, covering the Commonwealth scheme, South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania, all commenced within about three months of each other in 2024.

The differences that bite in practice

• What it is called. Victoria's offence is "workplace manslaughter", and it lives in Victoria's own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, not the model WHS Act, because Victoria never adopted the model law. Everywhere else it is "industrial manslaughter" inside the jurisdiction's WHS Act.
• Who prosecutes. In Western Australia only the Director of Public Prosecutions can bring an industrial manslaughter charge. In Queensland, prosecutions sit with an independent Work Health and Safety Prosecutor.
• How the maximum is set. The Northern Territory sets its corporate maximum in penalty units (65,000 of them) and its individual maximum at life imprisonment, the only jurisdiction to do either. Queensland's Act also works in penalty units; its regulator expresses the corporate maximum as $10 million on a page dated 2020. Unit-based maxima rise with indexation, which is why we publish each figure with its date rather than pretending the table is a single comparable column.
• No escape hatches. Tasmania's regulator notes there is no time limit for bringing an industrial manslaughter charge, and that enforceable undertakings are not available for it. WA's guide says the same about WHS undertakings for its offence.

The model law is quietly converging on the same place

The model WHS Act still contains no named industrial manslaughter offence, only a jurisdictional note letting each parliament insert one. But two national moves matter. In June 2022, following the Boland review, the model Act's Category 1 offence gained a gross negligence fault element, bringing the national template's most serious ordinary offence closer to the manslaughter statutes. And the model maximum monetary penalty for an inserted industrial manslaughter offence is CPI-indexed every July: Safe Work Australia's penalties page, updated for the year commencing 1 July 2026, now puts it at $21,274,000 for a body corporate alongside 20 years for an individual. That number moved this week, days before publication. Jurisdictions that hard-coded dollar figures in 2020 to 2024 will drift below the indexed model over time, which is exactly the kind of gap a future harmonisation round argues about.

What a conviction actually looks like

Because this masthead covers enforcement only as the regulator's own published outcome about an organisation, the cleanest available example is the one WorkSafe Tasmania itself publishes as a case study: the first company convicted under Victoria's workplace manslaughter law, LH Holding Management Pty Ltd, trading as Universal Stone and Marble, fined $1.3 million after a 2021 forklift incident killed a sub-contractor. The regulator's account is about the organisation's failures: a loaded forklift driven forward down a slope, no exclusion of people nearby. That is the shape of every industrial manslaughter case that will matter to readers of this page: a duty, an ordinary piece of work, and controls that were reasonably practicable and absent.

What to do with this

If your organisation operates in more than one jurisdiction, your board paper should not say "industrial manslaughter carries up to 20 years". It should carry this table, dated. The offence your officers are exposed to depends on where the death occurs, and the gap between a $10 million maximum and a $20 million one, or between 20 years and life, is not a rounding error. The underlying control is the same everywhere: the officer due diligence duty, which we cover in the plain-English map of Australia's WHS laws.