GROSS negligence resulting in an on-farm death or serious injury could incur massively increased financial penalties and double existing jail terms within two years, the farm sector was warned last week.
Law graduate farmer Emma Scotney told a gathering for the launch of SafeFarmsWA, a new website and farm safety manual on Thursday, the farm sector could not afford to ignore the changing emphasis on occupational health and safety (OHS).
“Farming businesses are often focussed on mitigating risk, be it seasonal variations, global commodity pricing or genetic diversification,” said Ms Scotney, who has farmed at Dandaragan with husband John for 23 years.
“The risk to farming businesses which fail to comprehensively address safety on farm cannot be overstated,” Ms Scotney said.
“Aside from the obligation and desire to protect our employees, foreshadowed legislative change will result in 800 times increased penalty provision and double the length of imprisonment associated with negligence leading to serious injury or death of an employee on a farm.
“SafeFarmsWA is to be commended for the work it is doing to assist the agricultural industry to mitigate these risks and for providing the necessary tools.”
Ms Scotney, of Hopgood Ganim Lawyers, initially proposed the alliance between SafeFarmsWA – the former Farmsafe WA Alliance rebranded and relaunched last week – and the company she works for.
It resulted in Hopgood Ganim’s agribusiness team, which includes lawyers who are also farmers and four from farming families, advising SafeFarmsWA on its farm safety manual to help farmers achieve OHS compliance.
In July the State government announced it intends updating 33-year-old OHS laws to bring them into line with the national Work Health and Safety Act via a modernised Work Health and Safety Bill to be tabled mid-2019.
It has started consultation on the bill which will replace the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1984, Mines Safety and Inspection Act 1994 and Petroleum and Geothermal Energy Safety Levies Act 2011, and amalgamate three enforcement agencies including WorkSafe.
The government said the bill would focus more on employer responsibility.
The maximum penalty for a level one offence has increased from $50,000 to $456,000, with the maximum penalty for a first-time level four offence increasing from $500,000 to more than $2.7 million and a maximum jail term for an individual convicted of a level four offence increasing from two years to five years.
Acting Worksafe Commissioner Simon Ridge said SafeFarmsWA could be involved in helping draft the new regulations.
“It’s very important that you take part and have a voice at the table,” Mr Ridge told about 55 people from agribusiness, representative bodies and supporting organisations at the launch.
“Statistically farming is not the best industry (for safety), but it is better than it used to be, we are on the right track and it will get better,” he said.
Mr Ridge pointed out as Farmsafe WA Alliance, SafeFarmsWA had run farm safety training courses, some in conjunction with WorkSafe, at various agricultural and TAFE colleges and a university which was an important step in getting the safety message out.
“It is particularly important that the OHS message is getting exposure to the people who are joining the agriculture industry and who are going to be the farm managers of the future,” Mr Ridge said.
As educator SafeFarmsWA also works closely with a chemicals team from WorkSafe, the “policeman” enforcing regulations.
“There’s some pretty toxic stuff farmers work with, safety is paramount in handling these things by the correct procedures,” Mr Ridge said.
SafeFarmsWA chairman and Capel dairy farmer Mike Norton said farming enterprises increasingly were incorporated bodies and that OHS penalties for incorporated bodies – even if they operated as a family farm – were much more severe than for individuals as employers, if a worker was injured or killed.
Insurance concerns were helping drive changes to OHS legislation, Mr Norton said.
“It’s a pretty dry subject, farmers are more interested in new tractors, new innovation and buying the next door neighbours’ farm than they are about their own safety issues,” he said.
“The biggest injury and fatality causers in agriculture at the moment are quad bikes and horses, believe it or not.
“The last three (agriculture) fatalities we’ve had in this State involved neither.
“We had a young boy suffocated in a grain bin whilst feeding sheep, a 60-year-old gent who got run over while pulling a tractor out of a bog after dark and a 19-year-old girl who got crushed by a bull.
“These are all pretty simple things that we do on farm every day and one would think you would not have a fatality doing that, but it just goes to show we have to lift our game.
“We have to be a little more switched on to what we are doing and that’s what the manual is all about,” Mr Norton said.
Darren West, Agriculture MLC and parliamentary secretary to Regional Development Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan, told the gathering he had a double interest in the work SafeFarmsWA was doing.
Apart from being “the only working farmer in State parliament”, he said an accident which killed a young boy feeding sheep had occurred on his sister’s farm.
“I just thought it was totally impossible you could drown a child in a grain feeder which has a 130 kilogram limit, but you can,” Mr West said.
“Sadly, for my sister’s family and the family of the boy involved, they will have that for the rest of their life.
“SafeFarmsWA is a very important organisation, it’s sons and wives and husbands that can be affected by accidents on farm.
“(On safety) agriculture doesn’t have a great story to tell.
“We have a culture that’s about ‘she’ll be right’, ‘we can do this’, ‘don’t worry about that just get the job done’ and I think that’s a culture we have to keep working at to change,” Mr West said.
SafeFarmsWA chief executive officer Maree Gooch said it was rebranded because people previously thought it was a part of WorkSafe.
Its new website, created with a $20,000 donation from CBH Group, is safefarms.net.au and it provides information and download forms on OHS issues.
SafeFarmsWA also offers three subscription packages with the top package providing on-line access to the farm safety manual and currently a free 30-minute consultation with a Hopgood Ganim lawyer.
For information phone 0402 611 290 or email admin@safefarms.net.au