Godfrey Hirst Australia Pty Ltd, a carpet manufacturing company, has resolved alleged breaches of Victoria’s OHS Act through an Enforceable Undertaking (EU) accepted by WorkSafe Victoria, following an incident where a truck driver was struck in the back by a forklift at its Breakwater, Geelong workplace.
In July 2024, whilst Godfrey Hirst employees operated forklifts to load a B-Double trailer with pallets of carpet tiles, the truck driver, contracted by another entity, was standing in the loading area waiting for the truck to be filled when he was struck in the back by a forklift operated by a Godfrey Hirst employee. The driver was knocked to the ground and briefly lost consciousness, requiring hospital treatment for bruising on the back of his ankle.
WorkSafe alleges the company failed to reduce the risk to health and safety by failing to have a traffic management plan in place to protect anyone in the loading area, including truck drivers and forklift operators, and issued two charges against the company for breaches of s.21 and s.23 of the OHS Act. Godfrey Hirst responded to the charges by proposing an EU, which was accepted by WorkSafe.
The EU has a total approximate cost of $150,000 and proposes three undertakings:
- The implementation of a $135,000 Artificial Intelligence (AI) system. This includes installing smart boom gates that use facial recognition to only allow staff who have completed necessary induction and training to access the highest-risk area of the workplace, and AI cameras around the workplace to continuously monitor traffic zones and on forklifts to enhance safety features such as pedestrian detection and speed reduction.
- The creation and delivery of an Industry training seminar to the Geelong manufacturing industry valued at $5,000.
- A charitable donation of $10,000 to the Barwon Health Foundation.
The acceptance of such an EU raises several questions about the role of enforceable undertakings in achieving accountability for serious safety failures.
WorkSafe’s own Enforceable Undertakings policy identifies circumstances where an EU may generally be unsuitable, including where there is a serious breach or high culpability, with the seriousness of the alleged offence to be assessed by consideration of the nature of the contravention, the actual or potential consequences arising from the risk created by the contravention, and other factors. When assessing the culpability of the duty holder, consideration should be given to whether the duty holder knew or ought to have known about the hazard, and whether there was a significant departure from widely known or accepted systems of work.
Forklifts are known to be the cause of workplace deaths and serious injuries. WorkSafe data shows that more than one worker every week in Victoria is seriously injured as a result of being struck by forklifts or falling forklift loads. WorkSafe regularly issues guidance on ways to reduce the risk by ensuring traffic management systems, such as physical barriers, exclusion zones and signage are in place. Just two months before the Godfrey Hirst incident WorkSafe inspectors began a targeted forklift safety inspection program and issued new guidance for employers.
WorkSafe Chief Health and Safety Officer Sam Jenkin said of the incident that it was concerning to see an experienced business operating forklifts near workers without a traffic management plan in place. “Too often we see incidents occur when the risks and hazards are well-known and employers should be very familiar with their obligations and prevention measures,” he said.
Godfrey Hirst has been operating in the Geelong area since 1865, and by 1980 had become one of the largest producers of wool carpet yarn in the world. Given the longstanding and well-known risks associated with forklift operations, it is reasonable to expect that established risk controls, such as effective separation of pedestrians and forklifts through exclusion zones or other measures, would be understood and implemented. The risk created by inadequate separation of pedestrians and forklifts is well recognised as having the potential to result in serious injury or death.
WorkSafe’s EU policy evaluates EU proposals against criteria including whether the undertaking offered extends beyond the duty holder’s obligations under the Act, and the degree to which the undertaking offered will cause material improvement to health and safety for employees, the workplace, the industry and the community. It could be argued that the implementation of a system to ensure separation of forklifts and workers does not extend beyond Godfrey Hirst’s base obligations under the Act and a seminar about the incident delivered to a select audience will have little impact on industry safety.
There is also good cause for concern about the implementation of an AI system to manage safety. The introduction of AI systems into a workplace can bring substantial risks and hazards, both physical and psychosocial – for example, data privacy and surveillance concerns, bias and inaccuracies in AI modelling, function creep where data is used for performance management and disciplinary purposes. The decision to introduce such systems to the workplace must be undertaken in consultation with employees, a step that is not identified as part of the implementation process in the EU.
The available penalty for breaches of s.21 and s.23 of the OHS Act is 9000 penalty units for a company – at the time of the incident in July 2024 that represented a value of $1,778,310. Although the February 2025 Sentencing Advisory Committee’s report into the sentencing of OHS offences found that the courts currently impose average fines of approximately 1.4% of the maximum penalty. That a significant proportion of the Undertaking consists of expenditure on systems within the company’s own workplace raises questions about whether the outcome provides an appropriate level of penalty and deterrence for serious safety failures.
The Sentencing Advisory Council’s (SAC) report to the Victorian Government made 12 recommendations for reform regarding the sentencing of OHS offences in Victoria. Although the SAC recommends increasing the use of orders other than fines, it recommends amendments to s.137 of the OHS Act to reframe undertakings as “health and safety orders” which can be imposed by the Courts and recommended increasing penalties overall.
The Victorian Government is yet to provide a response to the SAC report and recommendations.
Read more: Enforceable-undertaking-Godfrey-Hirst-20260709r.pdf