Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries) Share this | Hansard source

Everyone who goes to work should return home safely to their family each and every day. Both the 2018 Senate inquiry and the 2018 review into model workplace health and safety laws emphasised the need for improvements to and greater consistency in the application of enforcement and prosecution of the model work health and safety laws. The government remains open to the proposal of a nationally consistent industrial manslaughter offence, but we are first committed to understanding why there appear to be so few prosecutions for workplace deaths under the current general criminal laws, workplace health and safety laws and existing industrial manslaughter laws. As such, we wrote to state and territory ministers and are working with them to better understand the impediments to prosecutions and will meet to discuss potential changes in this area in the first half of this year.