With WHS penalties reaching up to $11.8 million for organisations and personal liability for individual officers, Australian property and facilities managers need auditable compliance. A documented, proactive system is available.
When a workplace incident involves a contractor on a commercial property site, the consequences can be severe. Under the model Work Health and Safety Act, a failure to comply with WHS duties that exposes a person to risk of death or serious injury carries penalties of up to $3.9 million for a body corporate. For the most serious breaches, those penalties rise to $11.8 million for an organisation — and $2.4 million personally for an individual officer (Safe Work Australia, Maximum Monetary Penalties, 1 July 2025). With 317 WHS prosecutions recorded nationally in 2024 and the figure growing year on year, the question is not whether these penalties apply. It is whether your organisation has the documented evidence to defend against them.
The WHS Act’s personal due diligence duty on officers — directors, executives, and senior managers — means liability does not stop at the corporate level. Courts have consistently found that assuming contractors are compliant is insufficient. The cases that attract the highest penalties are those where organisations had every opportunity to manage their risks, but lacked a documented system to prove they did.
For most property and facilities managers, contractor onboarding happens through emails and spreadsheets. Inductions are tracked inconsistently. Site risks are rarely connected to a formal follow-up process. When a regulator investigates, organisations are left reconstructing evidence of due diligence that was never properly captured.
Forsite, offers a unified ecosystem — online portal, mobile app, and on-site kiosk — that gives property, facilities, and H&S managers an auditable compliance and risk-management system for contractors that protects their sites and their organisation.
Forsite’s Contractor Management solution verifies, inducts, and confirms every contractor is compliant before they access sites, with live monitoring that flags lapsed credentials instantly and a full digital record of every compliance action. Its Risk Management solution gives organisations proactive, portfolio-wide visibility over site risks — formally logged, assessed, and tracked to resolution, building the structured paper trail that demonstrates due diligence when it matters most.
Trusted by leading property organisations across New Zealand — including PMG and Bayleys — Forsite is now bringing its proven platform to the Australian market. Safe Work Australia indexes WHS penalties annually to CPI, meaning exposure grows every year. The most cost-effective investment Australian property and facilities managers can make is a system that protect against testing how high those penalties can go.
For more information, visit getforsite.com.
