Warehousing near you

Warehouses licensed by the Australian Border Force are used by importers for longer-term storage of goods that have not yet been cleared for home consumption, which allows the payment of import duty and taxes to be deferred. The licence holder is responsible for the safe custody and accounting of those goods to the satisfaction of the ABF, and failure to do so makes the licence holder liable for any unpaid duty.

There is a further layer for excise equivalent goods. With the exception of catering bonds, provedores and duty free shops, all private and general warehouses that store excise equivalent goods, whether solely or alongside other goods, must be licensed by the Australian Taxation Office as well. If your stock includes alcohol, tobacco or fuel products, that second licence is the one to verify.

A depot is a different licence for a different purpose. Depots are places licensed by the Australian Border Force and used by importers to hold goods that must be moved away from the wharf or airport but have not yet been cleared for home consumption, typically for short-term storage, unpacking or deconsolidation.

The time limit is tight. Goods subject to customs control may be stored in a licensed depot until the end of the month following the month in which they arrived at the depot. The depot may seek an extension under section 77P of the Customs Act to hold them for a further month, but that is at the discretion of the ABF rather than an entitlement. Anyone planning to use a depot as cheap medium-term storage has misread the licence.

The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 imposes a primary duty of care on a person conducting a business or undertaking, and separate duties on officers, on workers and on other people at the workplace. Officers must exercise due diligence, which in a warehouse means knowing the hazards of forklift and pedestrian interaction, racking integrity and manual handling, not merely having a policy about them.

Part 3 of the Act deals with incident notification: certain incidents are notifiable, and the duty to notify is paired with a duty to preserve the incident site. The Act also contains an industrial manslaughter offence, and grades other failures as category one, two or three depending on the conduct. When you tour a site, asking how a notifiable incident would be handled tells you more than looking at the racking.

A business that manages premises where five or more heavy vehicles are loaded or unloaded each day is a loading manager under the Heavy Vehicle National Law, and that is a chain of responsibility function in its own right. Loading a heavy vehicle and unloading one are separate functions again, so a warehouse can easily be all three.

The practical consequence is that queueing, load restraint and dock scheduling are safety matters and not merely service levels. A driver pressured to leave a dock without restraining the load properly is a shared problem, and the regulator says the duty holder with the most control over work practices, training and resources is expected to take the lead. That is usually the site, not the driver.