Compliance Challenges

Compliance challenges are the practical obstacles that stop an Australian organisation meeting its legal obligations reliably. The recurring ones look much the same across most workplaces. Rules that differ by state, requirements that change faster than policies get reviewed, workers who sit outside the usual reporting lines, and no clean record of what was actually done.

Jurisdiction is the first problem. The model work health and safety laws have been implemented everywhere except Victoria, which runs its own regime under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, and several states that did adopt the model laws wrote their own variations into them. A national employer ends up running one internal standard against several legal ones.

Pace is the second. Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025. In New South Wales, section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act took effect on 1 July 2026 and turned approved codes of practice into enforceable benchmarks rather than guidance, so a business now has to follow the relevant code or show its alternative reaches an equivalent or higher standard.

The third is the assumption that running a course settles the matter. Victoria’s psychological health regulations are explicit that information, instruction and training cannot be the only control where the hazard could be reduced by changing work design, systems of work or the working environment. Training still matters. It is rarely enough on its own.

Common pressure points where these challenges surface:

• psychosocial risk, now explicitly regulated in every state and territory
• policies and procedures written once and never reviewed against the current law
• chain of responsibility duties reaching across contractors and the supply chain
• competition and consumer law obligations that sit outside the HR team’s usual view

Posts tagged here work through these problems as Australian organisations actually meet them. Safe Work Australia’s overview of the model WHS laws is the place to start on the jurisdictional picture. Obligations differ across states and territories and change often, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice and check anything contentious with your adviser. To see how organisations structure a response, browse Sentrient’s compliance training courses.