Psychosocial compliance in the Australian Capital Territory

There's a quiet pattern in the Australian psychosocial enforcement story that doesn't get talked about enough: the ACT has been ahead of every other jurisdiction on this for years, and most people outside Canberra still don't realise it.

WorkSafe ACT launched the country's first dedicated psychosocial hazards strategy on 6 October 2021, well before any state or territory had legislation in place that explicitly named psychosocial risk. They stood up a specialist team of psychosocial inspectors at the same time. By the time the ACT's amending regulation and the approved Code of Practice came into force on 27 November 2023, the Territory regulator had already been running an active enforcement programme for over two years. By today, that programme has been operating for closer to five.

If you have people working in Canberra, that history matters. ACT enforcement isn't theoretical. It's already producing notices, infringement fees, and a documented pattern of where employers are getting caught. This is what the law in the ACT now requires, what WorkSafe ACT is actively enforcing, and where most organisations with ACT workforces still have unresolved exposure.

The regulatory framework in the ACT

The duty to manage psychosocial risk in the Australian Capital Territory sits within the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (ACT) and the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011 (ACT). The Act establishes the primary duty of care that every person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) owes to its workers under section 19, and "health" is defined to include psychological health. WorkSafe ACT administers the framework, with Jacqueline Agius serving as ACT Work Health and Safety Commissioner. Commissioner Agius was reappointed in 2025 for a further five-year term running to 2030, and her office has released a Strategic Plan 2025–2029 and a Compliance and Enforcement Policy 2025–2029.

Psychosocial risk became an explicit regulatory obligation in the Territory on 27 November 2023, when the substantive provisions of the Work Health and Safety Amendment Regulation 2023 (No 1) (ACT) took effect. That instrument inserted a new division 3.2.11 into the principal Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011 (ACT), introducing sections 55A (meaning of psychosocial hazard), 55B (meaning of psychosocial risk), 55C (managing psychosocial risks), and 55D (control measures). Those sections remain in force inside the principal Regulation today. In practice they do three things. First, they define a psychosocial hazard as anything in the design or management of work, the work environment, plant at a workplace, or workplace interactions and behaviours that may cause psychological harm, whether or not it may also cause physical harm. Second, they require PCBUs to manage psychosocial risks in accordance with the Part 3.1 risk management framework, which brings the hierarchy of controls in section 36 into the picture: elimination first, then substitution, isolation, engineering, administrative controls, and PPE as a last resort. Third, they specify the matters a PCBU must consider when determining controls, including the duration, frequency, and severity of exposure, how multiple hazards interact, the design and systems of work, and the layout and environmental conditions of the workplace.

On the same date, the Work Health and Safety (Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice) Approval 2023 commenced. The Code is notifiable instrument NI2023-482, notified on 28 August 2023 and brought into force on 27 November 2023. It is an approved code of practice under section 274 of the WHS Act, and section 275 makes it admissible in proceedings as evidence of what is known about a hazard and what's reasonably practicable to do about it. The ACT Code is based on the national model code and material from WorkSafe Queensland, adapted for the ACT.

A second code followed on 11 November 2024: the Work Health and Safety (Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Code of Practice) Approval 2024 (NI2024-399), notified on 18 July 2024 and commenced on 11 November 2024. On the same day, the older ACT bullying code of practice was revoked, so harassment, sexual harassment, and gender-based harassment now sit inside the psychosocial framework rather than as a standalone bullying code. The Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Code is built specifically on the foundation of the psychosocial code and addresses one of the recommendations of the Australian Human Rights Commission's Respect@Work National Inquiry Report. For ACT employers, this means there are now two approved codes of practice that an inspector can rely on as evidence in a psychosocial matter, with the second one specifically addressing harassment, including sexual harassment as a distinct, regulated risk area.

What WorkSafe ACT is actually doing

This is where the ACT story diverges sharply from every other jurisdiction. WorkSafe ACT has been publishing concrete enforcement data on psychosocial activity, and the most recent numbers are striking enough to anchor any compliance conversation in the Territory.

In financial year 2024–25, the WorkSafe ACT Psychosocial Team conducted 120 workplace visits in the ACT alone. Those visits resulted in 225 improvement notices and two prohibition notices, with 97% of those notices issued under section 19 of the WHS Act (the primary duty of care). The same team issued nine infringement notices in the same period, with offence fees totalling $33,800. These aren't statistics from a regulator still building capability. They're the operational output of a team that's been embedded in the regulator since 2021.

The compensation data tells a parallel story. Between 2022–23 and 2024–25, there were 349 accepted private-sector workers' compensation claims in the ACT related to mental stress. Thirty-eight per cent of those claims arose from work-related harassment or bullying, and 65% were lodged by female workers. WorkSafe ACT has been explicit in its published safety alerts that the dominant pattern they're seeing on inspections is employers who haven't consulted with workers and haven't considered which psychosocial hazards exist in their workplace, let alone what controls should be in place.

WorkSafe ACT's expectations against that backdrop are straightforward. The first is hazard identification across the full range of psychosocial hazards named in the ACT Code and the regulator's published guidance: job demands, low job control, poor support, lack of role clarity, poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition, poor organisational justice, traumatic events or materials, remote or isolated work, poor physical environment, fatigue, and the harmful behaviours of bullying, harassment, and violence and aggression.

The second is consultation evidence. The WHS Act requires consultation with workers and, where applicable, health and safety representatives. WorkSafe ACT's published alerts make clear that the absence of consultation is the single most common reason for notices being issued. This isn't a procedural niceté for the ACT regulator. It's the threshold question. Worker input through structured surveys and consultation is what produces the evidence that hazards have been identified properly, and WorkSafe ACT expects to see consultation as a continuous activity tied to specific decisions about how work is designed and managed.

The third is controls that actually change the work. A policy that prohibits bullying isn't a control for bullying. A wellbeing programme isn't a control for excessive job demands. The regulator is looking for control measures that change the conditions of work, selected using the hierarchy of controls, with records of implementation, ownership, review dates, and evidence the control is doing what it was designed to do. WorkSafe ACT has been particularly focused on work-related violence, aggression, and sexual harassment as priority risk areas, and the regulator has the inspector capability to follow up across multiple visits.

Why the ACT moves first

The ACT's enforcement maturity is partly a function of timing and partly a function of regulator design. WorkSafe ACT moved early and visibly under Commissioner Agius, restructuring to create a dedicated psychosocial inspectorate before the amending regulation was in force, and publishing detailed strategic plans that signal continued investment. The annual Statement of Expectations issued by the Minister to the WHS Commissioner makes the regulator's priority focus a matter of public record, which means employers in the Territory can see exactly what's coming.

For organisations with ACT workforces, three practical consequences follow.

The first is that absence of a high-profile prosecution doesn't mean absence of enforcement. The notice volumes published by WorkSafe ACT, in particular the 225 improvement notices in a single year from one inspector team, sit well above what most observers assume. The enforcement model is sustained pressure through notices and infringements rather than a small number of headline prosecutions, and that model produces a great deal of regulatory exposure without ever making the front page.

The second is that the ACT regulator has explicitly told employers what it expects to see. The published guidance, the safety alerts, and the maturity tooling that WorkSafe ACT has released all describe the same architecture: identify, consult, control, review, document. There is no ambiguity about what good looks like, which means inspectors don't need to make discretionary judgements about whether an employer was on notice. They were.

The third is that the ACT public service workforce sits within the same framework. Commonwealth public service employers in the ACT are covered by the Commonwealth scheme rather than the ACT one, but for ACT government and ACT private-sector employers, there is no carve-out and no transitional grace period. The Code has been in force for over two years. The amending Regulation has been in force for the same period. The strategy that produced the inspectorate has been in operation for well over four. Framework activation by location becomes the practical question for organisations operating across borders, and our broader compliance by state collection maps where each jurisdiction sits.

What this means for employers with ACT people today

The ACT regulator has done something most other Australian regulators haven't: published the specific gaps it's finding in workplaces. The pattern is consistent. Employers without documented consultation. Employers with policies but no controls. Employers who have nominated EAPs and wellbeing programmes as their psychosocial risk response without ever having identified the underlying hazards those programmes were meant to address. WorkSafe ACT inspectors are pulling all of that apart on site, and the notices that follow reflect what wasn't there before they arrived.

A defensible position in the ACT today requires, at minimum:

A documented hazard identification process that covers the common psychosocial hazards in the ACT Code, applied to the actual conditions of work in the organisation rather than to a generic template. A risk register that records each identified hazard, its assessment against the matters specified in regulation 55D, and the controls applied to it. Consultation evidence that an inspector can read in five minutes: who was consulted, when, on what, and what changed as a result. Control measures with named owners, implementation dates, and review schedules, selected using the hierarchy of controls and with reasoning recorded for why lower-order controls were chosen where elimination wasn't reasonably practicable. A review process that tests whether controls are working and adjusts them when they aren't. Records that connect each of these stages to each other, so that a WorkSafe ACT inspector asking how a particular hazard was managed can be answered immediately rather than after a week of internal scrambling.

This is the architecture of systematic risk management. The challenge isn't understanding the requirement. It's moving from the reactive posture that's been adequate for most of the last decade to a system that produces evidence on a continuous basis without needing a crisis to generate it. The ACT regulator has been signalling this for almost five years. The notices that get issued to employers who haven't moved aren't enforcement surprises. They're the predictable consequence of a regulator that decided to lead on psychosocial well before the legislation made it explicit, and stayed with it.

We've written elsewhere about the cost of inaction once active enforcement begins. In the ACT, that conversation isn't about the future. It's about a regulator that's already there.

If you'd like to see how your current systems would hold up against the standard WorkSafe ACT is now applying, we run a short psychosocial readiness check that maps your existing controls against the obligations in the Act, the Regulation, and the ACT Code.

Disclaimer

This article is provided by ReFresh for general information purposes only. It summarises aspects of Australian Capital Territory work health and safety law as at 19 May 2026 and isn't a complete statement of the law. Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. Legislation, regulations, and codes of practice change over time, and the application of the law depends on the specific facts and circumstances of each organisation. ACT employers should obtain advice from a qualified legal practitioner or a competent work health and safety professional before making decisions about how to meet their obligations under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (ACT), the Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011 (ACT), or any approved code of practice referenced above. References to WorkSafe ACT, ACT legislation, and the national model code are provided for convenience only. ReFresh isn't affiliated with WorkSafe ACT or Safe Work Australia, and the views expressed are those of ReFresh.