For years, Australian employers treated workplace bullying as an HR issue. Something to be managed with policies, mediated through grievance procedures, and if it couldn’t be resolved, dealt with by moving someone sideways or waiting for the problem to leave on its own.
That approach is over. Regulators across Australia are now prosecuting workplace bullying as a work health and safety offence, with criminal charges, court appearances, and fines for both companies and individuals.
If you still think bullying is a “people problem” rather than a safety hazard, these cases should change your mind.
The apprentice who was set on fire
In March 2017, an electrical apprentice named Austin Courtney was working on a site in South Australia when two supervisors at Tad-Mar Electrical Pty Ltd decided to have some fun. One of them, Luke Daniel Chenoweth, squirted flammable liquid onto the apprentice’s boots, pants, and shirt, then ignited it with a lighter. When the apprentice tried to get away, Chenoweth chased him around the lunchroom, threatening to light his pants. The other supervisor, Jeffrey Mark Rowe, didn’t stop any of it. He squirted more flammable liquid onto the apprentice’s already-burning shirt.
SafeWork SA prosecuted Rowe under section 31 of the Work Health and Safety Act, a Category 1 offence, the most serious available. This is the provision for reckless conduct that exposes a person to the risk of death or serious injury. It was the first successful Category 1 prosecution in South Australia, and Sparke Helmore noted at the time that it was understood to be the first successful bullying prosecution under the harmonised WHS laws nationally.
Rowe pleaded guilty and was fined $12,000, reduced for his early plea.
Chenoweth pleaded guilty and was fined $21,000.
Tad-Mar Electrical Pty Ltd pleaded guilty and was fined $15,000.
Forty eight thousand dollars for setting a young worker on fire. The dollar figure is almost beside the point. What matters is that a court classified this as a criminal safety offence, not a workplace dispute. SafeWork SA’s Executive Director, Martyn Campbell, called the behaviour “atrocious.” The conviction established that bullying, even when dressed up as “horseplay” or a “prank”, can meet the threshold for the most serious charge in the WHS Act.
The director who bullied a subcontractor for four years
In Victoria, WorkSafe prosecuted Printco (Aust) Pty Ltd and its director after an investigation found the director had subjected a subcontractor to verbal abuse, intimidation, and threats over a period of more than four years.
The bullying caused the subcontractor anxiety and a mental injury serious enough to prevent him from working. In one documented incident in August 2021, the director yelled and swore at the subcontractor over the phone when he questioned whether they should be working during COVID-19 lockdowns. The investigation found other workers had also been bullied by the director.
Printco’s anti-bullying policy didn’t explain how to report inappropriate behaviour, didn’t define or give examples of bullying, and the company had provided no anti-bullying training. Both the company and the director pleaded guilty. Each was fined $20,000, with $9,309 in costs.
Forty thousand dollars total. Again, the fine itself is modest. But the case did something important: it confirmed that a director can be personally prosecuted as an officer for failing to address bullying in their own business. The charge wasn’t just against the company, it was against the person running it.
The tradesman who bullied his apprentices
In New South Wales, a Hunter Region carpenter and joiner was convicted after SafeWork NSW found he had subjected two young apprentices to sustained verbal abuse, name-calling, swearing, belittling comments, and threats over an extended period.
Both apprentices reported distress, anxiety, nightmares, and fear of going to work.
The tradesman pleaded guilty to failing to take reasonable care that his actions did not adversely affect others’ health and safety. He was fined $6,000, ordered to pay costs, and notably, required by the court to attend training in bullying and harassment, anger management, and emotional intelligence.
The court-ordered training is worth pausing on. It’s unusual. Courts don’t routinely order individual workers to undertake specific professional development as part of a WHS penalty. The order suggests the magistrate saw the problem as both a safety failure and a competence gap and decided to address both.
What these cases tell employers
Bullying is now a prosecutable safety hazard
This isn’t theoretical. It’s not a warning about what might happen. It has happened, in South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales. Regulators have charged both companies and individuals. Courts have convicted them.
The legal mechanism is straightforward. Psychosocial hazards including bullying, harassment, intimidation, and verbal abuse, are recognised hazards under WHS legislation. Employers have a duty to eliminate or minimise those hazards so far as reasonably practicable. When they fail, and a worker is harmed, the same enforcement tools that apply to a missing machine guard or an unventilated chemical store apply to a manager who screams at their staff.
Individuals can be charged, not just companies
The Tad-Mar and Printco cases both resulted in charges against individuals, a supervisor and a director respectively. The NSW tradesman was charged as an individual worker. The WHS Act imposes duties on persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs), officers, and workers. All three can face prosecution.
This matters because bullying is, by definition, personal. It comes from specific people making specific choices. When the regulator decides to prosecute, they look not just at the company’s systems but at the individuals whose conduct caused the harm.
Having a policy is not enough
Every one of these workplaces could have had a bullying policy. Printco did have one, it just didn’t work. It didn’t define bullying, didn’t explain reporting, and wasn’t backed by training. The policy existed on paper. The bullying existed in practice. The court was interested in the practice, not the paper.
This is the gap that regulators are now targeting. Not whether you have a policy, but whether the policy functions. Whether workers know how to use it. Whether complaints are investigated. Whether consequences follow.
The fines are going up
The penalties in these early cases — $6,000, $20,000, $48,000 are low by WHS standards. But they were imposed under provisions that hadn’t previously been used for psychosocial hazards. Now that the precedent exists, and regulators are investing in dedicated psychosocial enforcement teams, the penalties will increase. The maximum for a Category 1 offence under the WHS Act is $3 million for a body corporate and $600,000 for an individual, with up to five years’ imprisonment. Nobody has been hit with those maximums for bullying yet. But the pathway is now clear.
What to do about it
This isn’t complicated, but it does require effort.
First, assess the risk. Not with a survey that sits in a drawer but with a genuine process that identifies which psychosocial hazards exist in your workplace, who is exposed, and how severe the risk is. Talk to workers. Look at turnover data, complaints history, workers’ compensation claims, and exit interview themes.
Second, implement controls. The hierarchy of controls applies to psychosocial hazards just as it applies to physical ones. Eliminate the hazard where possible. Where elimination isn’t practicable, minimise the risk through job design, supervision, training, workload management, and reporting systems that actually work.
Third, train your people. Not a once-a-year compliance webinar. Practical training that equips managers to recognise bullying, respond to reports, and model the behaviour they expect from their teams. The NSW court ordered the tradesman to attend this kind of training as a penalty. Your managers should be attending it as a prevention measure.
Fourth, respond when it happens. The common thread in every one of these cases is that the bullying went on for an extended period, four years at Printco, multiple years at Tad-Mar, “an extended period” in the NSW case. Somebody knew. Somebody should have acted. Nobody did, until the regulator arrived.
The regulator showing up at your door is a management failure. The prosecution that follows is the consequence.