This bill is intended to reduce unnecessary compliance costs, increase certainty for businesses and organisations about their obligations, and continue to reduce the incidence of workplace fatalities, injuries, and illnesses.
This bill has been accorded urgency in the House. First detected 11 July 2026, 9:19am UTC.
The avenues that remain: petitions to Parliament (including seeking amendment or repeal); consultation on the regulations that often follow an Act, which do carry public submission windows; and the member in charge or your electorate MP on implementation problems — post-passage corrections ride in later amendment bills.
| Stage | Sitting day | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Second reading | 30 Jun 2026 | The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill was read a second time. source · debate & vote (Hansard) |
| Committee of the whole House | 30 Jun 2026 | The committee stage of the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill was completed. source · debate & vote (Hansard) |
| Third reading | 30 Jun 2026 | The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill was read a third time. source · debate & vote (Hansard) |
Dates are sitting days as recorded by the Office of the Clerk; a sitting extended under urgency continues under its original day. Readings are decided by party vote: each party casts its members’ votes en bloc (proxies included), so the whole House needn’t be present and individual attendance isn’t recorded — the party-by-party tally for each reading is in that day’s Hansard, linked per stage above.
Members who took a call in this bill’s debates, from our Hansard corpus. Under urgency several bills are often debated together (a “cognate” debate), so speakers may be addressing the group of bills.
Topics in the OpenBrief corpus matched to this bill’s title, with their volume over the last six weeks — how loud the subject already was when urgency was moved. This is retrieval against our existing corpus, not model judgement.
| Topic | Press items · 6wk | Social posts · 6wk |
|---|---|---|
| health and safety risk | 0 | 0 |
AI-assisted analysis · every claim links to primary source ·
corrections
Published 15 Jul 2026, 7:21am UTC (separate from, and later than, the alert timestamp above)
· model: claude-opus-4-8
In short: Small PCBUs (fewer than 20 workers) need only comply with core health-and-safety duties in relation to "critical risks", not all workplace risks.
“A small PCBU is required— (a) to comply with the following provisions (critical risk provisions) only in relation to critical risks:”
“small PCBU means a PCBU in whose business or undertaking fewer than 20 workers carry out work in any capacity”
“A person who complies with the external risk requirements must be is taken to have complied with the work health and safety duty.”
“who acts in accordance with an approved code of practice that relates to the same risk and the same situation or set of circumstances person and the risk or other matter, must be is taken to have complied with this Act”
“The Governor-General may, by Order in Council made on the recommendation of the Minister, amend Schedule 1A.”
“to provide a balanced framework for securing the health and safety of workers and workplaces that prioritises the critical risks that arise from work (including by prioritising the management of those risks by PCBUs)”
“A draft code of practice, a draft amendment to an approved code of practice, or a proposal to revoke an approved code of practice may be developed by any person or organisation”
“This section does not require the PCBU to take any action in relation to the effects or potential effects of seismic risk affecting on any building element of the building”
Taken under urgency; the compressed timetable limited scrutiny even where a committee stage existed.
Method: the model reads the bill as published (claude-opus-4-8); every claim above carries a verbatim span of that text, checked mechanically — claims that fail the check are dropped, not softened. Text analysed from an archived copy of the official text. Full methodology →
A motion to accord urgency to the following business was agreed to: - the remaining stages of: - the Antisocial Road Use Legislation Amendment Bill; - the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill; - the Offshore Renewable Energy Bill; - the Healthy Futures (Pae Ora) Amendment Bill; and - the Regulatory Systems (Primary Industries) Amendment Bill; - the first reading and referral to a select committee of: - the Building Amendment Bill; and - the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill; - the second reading of: - the Local Government (System Improvements) Amendment Bill; - the Crimes Amendment Bill; - the Land Transport (Revenue) Amendment Bill; - the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Amendment Bill; and - the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) (3 Day Postnatal Stay) Amendment Bill; - the first reading and referral to a select committee of: - the Community Magistrates Legislation Amendment Bill; and - the Environmental Reporting Amendment Bill; - the second reading of: - the Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill; and - the Emergency Management Bill (No 2); - the first reading and referral to a select committee of the Regulatory Systems (Social Security) Amendment Bill (No 2); - the discharge and re-committal to a select committee of the Regulatory Systems (Courts) Amendment Bill; and - the remaining stages of: - the Regulatory Systems (Tribunals) Amendment Bill and the Regulatory Systems (Occupational Regulation) Amendment Bill; - the Mental Health Bill; - the Plain Language Act Repeal Bill; and - the Constitution Amendment Bill.
