Criminology Research Council grant ; (44/89)
The products of this research, comprising various papers and journal articles, have been bound in one volume under the project's title.
This study was conceived as a joint project between Dr Andrew Hopkins of the ANU and Dr James Harrison, then of the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (NIOHS), now Director of the National Injury Surveillance Unit in Adelaide. It is based in part on data supplied by NIOHS and on data collected independently by the investigators from the NSW Coroner, the industrial inspectorate, and various other regulatory bodies.
The aim of the project was to study the response of the legal/regulator system to all 129 work-related fatalities which occurred in NSW in 1984. The year 1984 was chosen because NIOHS had already carried out a major study identifying which of the many thousands of fatalities reported to coroners in 1984 were work-related. It was this previous work which made the present study feasible.
One of the more striking findings of the study was that 28 per cent of all the work-related fatalities under consideration involved trucks, most of them travelling over long distances. This group of cases was looked at in detail. Such cases arguably involve violations of the NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act, which requires employers to provide a safe system of work, but none of the fatalities was investigated by the agency responsible for enforcing this Act.