The advent of industrial manslaughter laws in workplace health and safety legislation that include provisions for criminal negligence has raised profound issues for engineers and senior decision makers. It is now essential to demonstrate the management of the laws of nature in a way that satisfies the laws of man (in that order).

Legally, safety risk does not arise because something is inherently dangerous, but because there are insufficient, inadequate or failed precautions as determined by our courts post event.

This webinar will outline the paradigm shift from hazard-based risk management to the precautionary approach enshrined in WHS/OHS legislation, and explore how organisations can demonstrate safety due diligence.

You’ll learn about the legal duties of directors to demonstrate due diligence, how to make defensible decisions regarding engineering design work that can be easily understand by legal counsel and how to resolve the inconsistencies between the Risk Management Standard and due diligence requirements in legislation.

 Learning outcomes

• Legal duties of directors to demonstrate due diligence under the provisions of WHS, EPA and corporations’ law
• What constitutes due diligence under Australian High Court case (common) law
• Determine what risk management technique(s) can be used to establish due diligence, and in which circumstances
• Legislative and regulatory compliance ? due diligence, especially for safety matters
• Why the use of risk targets (that is, tolerable or acceptable risk) is indefensible in court post-event

The facilitators

Gaye Francis is an experienced risk and due diligence engineer and project manager with a diverse range of project experience. She is also one of the directors of engineering firm, R2A.

Gaye has worked with both private and government clients across a wide range of industries, including road, rail, marine, mining, aviation and water. At R2A, Gaye is involved in all aspects of the practice and oversees the consulting stream.

She is passionate about sharing her expertise to help organisations minimise risk and maintain compliance with the law.

Richard Robinson BE BA MRSV FIEAust is Chairman of R2A Due Diligence Engineers.

Richard is a Fellow of Engineers Australia and an Honorary Fellow of the Australasian Marine Pilots Institute. Richard has degrees in Engineering (Monash University) and Philosophy (University of Melbourne). He is the principal author of Engineering Due Diligence (11th edition 2019) which is used as a text by a number of Australian Universities.

Richard was also a major contributor to the third revision of the Engineers Australia's safety case guideline.