The third edition of Work Health and Safety Law and Policy continues to provide a plain English approach to explaining and analysing the law which regulates work health and safety in Australia. Providing broad coverage, this book focuses on the role that legal regulation plays in preventing work-related injury and disease, as well as the way in which the law contributes to rehabilitating and compensating injured and ill workers.

This third edition focuses on the national model Work Health and Safety Bill 2009. The provisions of the model Bill are outlined, along with court decisions and other documentation that help interpret the provisions in new legislation enacting the model Bill. There is also a chapter in the book examining the national model Work Health and Safety Regulations 2011, and model codes of practice. The book includes three chapters on common law, statutory workers’ compensation provisions and rehabilitation. Tables summarising the key legal provisions of the major Australian Commonwealth, State and Territory workers’ compensation statutes have been updated and give quick and easy reference to points of legislation. The book also covers legal instruments outside of the work health and safety and workers’ compensation statutes that are relevant to understanding work health and safety law and policy.

This important book considers these legal principles in their many contexts – historical, social, political and economic – and encourages readers to apply legislation and case law in a variety of ways. This approach supports an understanding of the subject as an evolving regulatory response to complex social processes and policy concerns, rather than as a fixed set of rules.

In the third edition of this well-established work, principal author Professor Richard Johnstone has been joined by leading work health and safety scholar Dr Elizabeth Bluff and workers’ compensation expert Associate Professor Alan Clayton.