WorkSafe Victoria

WorkSafe is Victoria’s workplace health and safety regulator and the workplace injury insurer.

WorkSafe’s responsibilities include:
• monitoring and enforcing Victoria’s OHS laws
• helping to prevent work-related deaths, injuries and disease
• providing adequate and just workplace injury insurance
• assisting injured workers back into the workforce by managing Victoria’s workers’ compensation scheme.

To put it simply, our purpose is to reduce workplace harm and improve outcomes for injured workers.

In our prevention efforts, WorkSafe uses a range of tools and strategies to ensure workplaces are safe. This includes campaigns, education programs, guidance, targeted interventions, enforcement, warnings, and prosecutions.

WorkSafe have inspectors located across our metropolitan and regional offices, with our head office located in Geelong. We have a dedicated state-based team of inspectors with oversight of quarries and mines.

Role of WorkSafe inspectors
The primary role of WorkSafe inspectors is to ensure employers and other duty holders, including quarry and mine operators
comply with OHS laws. Inspectors do this by:
• conducting strategically targeted inspections or in response to incidents and reported health and safety issues
• providing practical and helpful information and guidance to duty holders about how to fulfil their duties and obligations

• enforcing Victoria’s health and safety laws by:
• • making duty holders take action to fix health and safety breaches
• • recommending comprehensive investigations to decide whether a breach of health and safety laws has occurred
requiring prosecution or other action
• • gathering data that can help prevent future OHS breaches.

In the last financial year WorkSafe inspectors conducted more than 50,000 workplace visits, which included visits to quarries and mines.

Workplace injury insurer
Preventing injuries is always WorkSafe’s first priority, but when a workplace injury does occur, our job is to improve outcomes for those who are injured. Supporting them to recover and, where possible, return to safe work.

Our role is to provide injured workers with a range of support, as stipulated in our legislation. This may include weekly income payments, hospital, medical and allied health treatment, personal and household help and lump sums for permanent impairment.

And we know a workplace injury can extend well beyond the workplace and in some instances can significantly change people’s lives. This includes supporting those families who have tragically lost a loved one at work.

In 2024, 46 Victorians died because of a workplace incident.

Behind these statistics are real people, hardworking people who went to work and never came home. There is no acceptable number here other than zero, and that is why WorkSafe’s targeted prevention efforts remain a priority.

CMPA has recently had early meetings with Work Safe to develop future articles relevant to the quarry industry.

For more information
For more information about WorkSafe or your health and safety obligations visit the WorkSafe website at www.worksafe.vic.gov.au or scan the QR code:

The WorkSafe’s health and safety and injury compensation advisory service is also available from 07:30am to 06:30pm, Monday to Friday and can be contacted on 1800 136 089.

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