Two Directors Were Fined Personally in One Week. Officer Due Diligence Is Being Enforced.

In the space of a single week in July 2026, courts in New South Wales finalised a run of work health and safety penalties that anyone who sits on a board or signs off a budget should read carefully. Two of them did not land on a company. They landed on a person. A sole director was fined $195,500 after a doctor was seriously injured by hydrogen sulphide during biogas experiments, and the director of a stone masonry business was fined $60,000 in his own name, on top of his company’s $75,000, over silica dust. Both were prosecuted for failing a duty that cannot be handed to anyone else: the officer’s duty of due diligence.

The company is not the only one who pays

Under section 27 of the Work Health and Safety Act, an officer of a business, which includes company directors and others who make or take part in decisions affecting a substantial part of the business, must exercise due diligence to make sure the business meets its safety duties. It is a positive, personal duty. The business can be prosecuted, and separately, so can the officer.

That is exactly what happened here. Peter Fusarelli, sole director of research firm Myra Corporate, was convicted and fined $195,500 in the District Court over an incident where a doctor was exposed to hydrogen sulphide, a gas that can cause unconsciousness or death at high concentrations. In a separate case, Crystal Touch Masonry was fined $75,000 and its sole director, Raad Patti, a further $60,000 in the Industrial Court, after a worker was found cutting a stone slab with a grinder while covered in fine dust. A sample of the slab was 34 per cent quartz, the source of respirable crystalline silica. In both matters the regulator did not stop at the company. It named the officer and asked whether he had personally done enough.

A more recent matter shows how far the officer duty reaches once a business is split across entities. On 31 August 2026 SafeWork NSW announced that two related companies and their sole director had been convicted and fined $420,000 in total in the District Court of NSW, over an incident on 24 March 2022 in which a worker was seriously injured by an industrial gate that overran its vertical supports. The employment company was fined $180,000 under section 19(1), the primary duty to workers. The operating company was fined $180,000 under section 21(2), the duty of a business with management or control of fixtures, fittings or plant at a workplace. The sole director was fined $60,000 for two separate offences under section 27(1), one for each company he directed. All three pleaded guilty. The corporate structure did not divide the duty between the entities. It multiplied the defendants, and it convicted one person twice over a single incident.

One week, four different hazards

The two director penalties did not arrive in isolation. Over the same stretch, SafeWork NSW also secured fines against Vanovi Carpentry, $120,000 after a worker stepped on a ceiling joist that collapsed and dropped him about six metres, Ben Furney Flour Mills, $90,000 after workers were exposed to chlorine gas with only two respirator masks on site, and Swain Farms, $60,000 after a teenage worker’s foot was degloved by an unguarded auger.

Gas, silica, a fall from height, an unguarded machine. Four different hazards, four different industries, one week. None of them is exotic. Every one is a hazard with a well-known control that was either missing or not being followed. That is the pattern a regulator reads as a management failure rather than bad luck, and it is the pattern an auditor is trained to look for before it becomes a prosecution.

What the officer’s duty asks

Due diligence is not a feeling that safety is under control. The Act sets out what it means in concrete terms. An officer has to take reasonable steps to acquire and keep up to date knowledge of work health and safety matters, to understand the operations of the business and the hazards and risks involved, to make sure the business has and uses appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise those risks, to make sure there are processes for receiving and acting on information about incidents and hazards, and to verify that all of this is actually happening. SafeWork NSW sets out the same expectations in plain language in its guidance on the work health and safety duty of an officer.

Two things follow from that list. First, the duty is proactive. It is about what you did before the incident, not how well you responded after it. Second, it cannot be delegated. An officer can rely on competent people and credible advice, and should, but the duty to verify that the system is working stays with the officer. When SafeWork asks what reasonable steps you took, silence is the answer that gets an officer named alongside the company.

Where ISO 45001 turns due diligence into evidence

Read that list of reasonable steps again and it maps almost one for one onto a working ISO 45001 occupational health and safety system. Clause 5.1 puts leadership and accountability on top management by name, which is the same population as the officers under the Act. The hazard identification and risk clauses are how you understand and control the operations. Resourcing is a stated requirement, not an afterthought. Management review is the structured process for receiving and acting on information about incidents and performance. And internal audit under clause 9.2 is the verification step, the independent check that the controls you believe are in place are actually being followed on the floor.

The value of that to an officer is simple. A certified system produces a dated, documented trail of exactly the reasonable steps the Act asks about: the risk assessments, the resourcing decisions, the review minutes, the audit findings and the actions closed out. It does not make an incident impossible. It does mean that if one happens, the officer can show what they did rather than hope a court infers it. That is the difference between the businesses fined this month and the ones that were not. It is also the argument behind SafeWork NSW telling employers exactly what it will inspect this year: the evidence is expected to already exist.

Where Streamline fits

If you are an officer and you are not confident you could show the reasonable steps you have taken, that gap is what a management system is built to close. Streamline helps Australian organisations design and certify ISO 45001, so leadership accountability, resourcing, review and internal audit produce evidence as a matter of routine rather than a scramble after an incident. If you would rather build and run the system with your own team, our ISO mentoring gets you there with expert guidance at each step. Either way, the goal is the same: due diligence you can point to, not just describe.