The Court convicted a family-owned agricultural company of a Category 2 WHS offence and imposed a fine of $555,000 (after 25% early plea discount from $740,000) for failing to mandate helmet use and rollover protection for quad bike operations, resulting in a worker's death. The Court held that extra-curial punishment may be taken into account when sentencing a corporate offender where the company is the alter ego of a small family unit and the personal loss suffered by its directors was not an intended product of the offending, but this does not apply with equal force to large impersonal enterprises. The Court also held that payment of the prosecutor's costs is only relevant to penalty assessment where the offender has limited capacity to pay, disagreeing with the broader approach in BlueScope Steel that treated costs as part of overall punishment, and that general deterrence remains significant even where industry awareness of the relevant risk is high, because deterrence targets non-compliance rather than ignorance of hazards.
The full text is available to signed-in members.