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Under section 19 of the Work Health and Safety Act, a person conducting a business or undertaking must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers it engages or causes to be engaged, and of workers whose activities it influences or directs, while they are at work. The same section extends the duty to other people whose health and safety may be put at risk by the work, and spells out specific obligations including safe plant and structures, safe systems of work, adequate welfare facilities, and the information, training, instruction or supervision necessary to protect people.

Section 18 defines reasonably practicable as what is reasonably able to be done, weighing the likelihood of the hazard or risk occurring, the degree of harm that might result, what the person knows or ought reasonably to know about the risk and the ways of eliminating or minimising it, the availability and suitability of those ways, and only then the cost — and cost counts against a control only where it is grossly disproportionate to the risk.

That ordering is why a competent Australian risk report puts the control options and the knowledge test before the budget conversation. A document that starts from what the business can afford has already inverted the statutory test.

The Act grades offences. The most serious category applies where a person with a health and safety duty, without reasonable excuse, engages in conduct that exposes an individual to a risk of death or serious injury or illness and is reckless or negligent as to that risk. The middle category applies where a failure to comply with a duty exposes an individual to a risk of death or serious injury or illness. The lowest category applies to a failure to comply with a health and safety duty without that exposure element. The Act also contains an industrial manslaughter offence, which applies where a duty holder or an officer intentionally engages in conduct that breaches a health and safety duty and that conduct causes a person's death.

For a risk consultant's client, the practical reading is that the evidence trail matters as much as the control. Categories turn on what was known, what was available and what was done about it, and all three of those are documentary questions after the fact.

A risk framework decays quietly. The register stops being updated, the controls listed in it stop matching what happens on site, and the board keeps receiving a report that was accurate two years ago. Because the officer duty includes keeping knowledge up to date and verifying that processes are used, a stale register is not a neutral document — it is evidence.

The most useful thing a consulting engagement can leave behind is a cadence rather than a binder: who reviews what, how often, what triggers an out-of-cycle review, and what the verification step looks like when a control is claimed to be in place.

Engaging an adviser does not shift the duty. The business still holds the primary duty, and each officer still holds the personal due diligence duty. What a consultant provides is capability and evidence: hazard identification you would not have done as well yourself, a control set you can defend, and a record that the officers took reasonable steps.

That also means the consultant's independence is worth protecting. A report that tells the board what it wants to hear is worse than no report, because it documents that the officers were told there was nothing to do.