Psychosocial compliance in Victoria
Luke Giuseppin
Victoria was the last Australian jurisdiction to introduce express psychosocial compliance obligations, and the first to establish a landmark prosecution precedent under them. The Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017 were amended on 1 December 2025 to include specific psychological health provisions, with no transitional period. Two years earlier, Court Services Victoria was fined $379,157 after a toxic workplace culture contributed to an employee's suicide, setting the first major psychosocial penalty benchmark in Australia.
For employers operating in Victoria, the legal framework is structurally different from the rest of the country. Victoria does not follow the model Work Health and Safety Act; it operates under its own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004. Multi-state organisations that assume their NSW, Queensland, or Commonwealth compliance posture automatically covers Victoria are operating on a faulty assumption.
This page sets out the law that applies in Victoria, what WorkSafe Victoria expects from organisations, what the Court Services Victoria prosecution signals for enforcement, and what compliance actually looks like under the Victorian framework. The financial picture of failing to meet the duty is set out separately on the cost of psychosocial non-compliance and the cost of psychological injury claims.
The OHS Act, regulations, and guidance that apply in Victoria
Psychosocial compliance in Victoria is governed by the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 2017, and WorkSafe Victoria's guidance on preventing and managing work-related psychological injury.
The OHS Act 2004 establishes the general duty of care. Section 21 requires every employer to provide and maintain, so far as is reasonably practicable, a working environment that is safe and without risks to health. The Act defines "health" to include psychological health, placing psychological safety on the same legal footing as physical safety. Victoria uses the term "employer" rather than the model WHS term "person conducting a business or undertaking" (PCBU), and the duty language differs accordingly.
The OHS Regulations 2017 were amended effective 1 December 2025 to introduce express psychological health duties. The regulations require employers to identify psychosocial hazards, eliminate risks so far as reasonably practicable, and otherwise reduce them using control measures appropriate to the hazard. Victoria's framework applied with no transitional period. Compliance was required from day one, not phased in over months. That is unusual. Most Australian jurisdictions allowed organisations transitional time when they introduced express psychosocial provisions. Victoria did not.
Victoria does not currently publish a psychosocial-specific code of practice in the same format as New South Wales or Western Australia. WorkSafe Victoria instead provides detailed guidance material on preventing and managing work-related psychological injury. The practical effect is similar: the guidance sets out what WorkSafe expects to see, and an inspector will reference it when assessing compliance.
What WorkSafe Victoria expects from organisations
WorkSafe Victoria expects employers to identify psychosocial hazards in their workplaces, assess the risks those hazards pose, implement control measures to eliminate or reduce the risks, and review whether those controls are working. This is the standard four-step risk management cycle embedded across Australian workplace health and safety law. The Psychosocial Compliance Internal Audit Checklist walks through what evidence each step needs to produce.
When a WorkSafe Victoria inspector attends a workplace, the questions are consistent with those asked by regulators in every other Australian jurisdiction:
What psychosocial hazards have been identified?
How were the risks assessed?
What records document the identification and assessment?
What controls have been implemented?
Who is responsible for each control?
When were the controls last reviewed?
What evidence demonstrates that the controls are working?
The answers most Victorian employers can give to those questions are not materially different from the answers NSW or Queensland employers give. The common pattern is an EAP, a wellbeing program, an annual engagement survey, a generic respectful workplace policy, and no documented link between any of those measures and the specific psychosocial hazards present in the business. That pattern does not meet the regulation, regardless of jurisdiction. Running compliance manually is itself part of why the gap persists.
The Victorian-specific detail worth knowing is that the OHS Act framework treats the general duty under section 21 as the anchor, with the 2017 Regulations specifying what managing psychosocial risk looks like in practice. An organisation that can articulate its hazards, risks, controls, and review mechanisms against the 2017 Regulations will satisfy the duty. An organisation that cannot will not.
The Court Services Victoria prosecution
In October 2023, Court Services Victoria was fined $379,157 after pleading guilty to charges arising from the death by suicide of a coronial registrar at the Coroners Court of Victoria. The prosecution, brought by WorkSafe Victoria under the OHS Act 2004, remains the largest psychosocial safety penalty to date in Australia, and the case that every Australian regulator now cites when explaining the cost of psychosocial non-compliance.
The substance of the prosecution was a failure to identify and manage psychosocial hazards associated with a toxic workplace culture. Workloads were unmanageable. Complaints about bullying and poor support had been raised and not resolved. The systemic hazards were identifiable, the exposure was foreseeable, and the employer did not take reasonably practicable steps to control the risk.
The case matters for three reasons. First, it establishes that psychosocial hazards can be prosecuted under the OHS Act's general duty provisions, not just specific regulatory breaches. Second, it signals that regulators will pursue psychosocial prosecutions even where the harm is psychological rather than physical. Third, it sets a financial benchmark that is now referenced in every serious conversation about psychosocial enforcement in Australia. The full personal-exposure picture for officers sits alongside that benchmark.
The prosecution also predates the December 2025 psychological health regulations by almost exactly two years. An inspector now has express regulatory provisions to reference in addition to the general duty. That strengthens the enforcement toolkit, not weakens it.
How WorkSafe Victoria is enforcing
WorkSafe Victoria enforces the OHS Act through improvement notices, prohibition notices, infringement notices, and prosecutions in the Magistrates' Court or higher courts depending on severity. The regulator publishes annual activity data and maintains a public prosecution register, both of which are accessible through the WorkSafe Victoria website.
The enforcement posture following the 1 December 2025 commencement is shaped by three factors worth understanding. The first is recency: the express psychosocial provisions are relatively new, and WorkSafe Victoria is in an early period of inspector training and enforcement ramp-up. That does not mean enforcement is delayed. It means enforcement actions in the first 12 to 18 months will focus on educating organisations about the new provisions while prosecuting the most serious breaches.
The second is the precedent set by Court Services Victoria. A prosecution of that scale becomes a reference point for every subsequent case. Inspectors and investigators benchmark their expectations against the body of conduct the court found to be a breach.
The third is the broader Australian enforcement trajectory. WorkSafe Victoria operates in the same national context as SafeWork NSW, which has dedicated psychosocial inspectors, compulsory psychosocial checks for organisations with 200 or more workers, and a 66% prosecution rate on completed investigations. Victorian enforcement is unlikely to diverge materially from the national direction.
Penalties under the Victorian OHS framework
The OHS Act 2004 (VIC) sets out offence and penalty provisions that differ structurally from the model WHS Act penalty scheme used in other jurisdictions. Maximum penalties for breaches of the general duty are indexed and substantial, with the most serious breaches attracting penalties in the millions for body corporates and potential imprisonment for individuals involved in reckless conduct.
Officers, including directors and senior executives, carry duties under the OHS Act that make them personally accountable for organisational safety performance. An officer cannot discharge that duty by delegation. They must take reasonable steps to understand the organisation's operations and associated hazards, including psychosocial hazards, and verify that the organisation has appropriate resources and processes to manage them. The wider cost of officer liability covers this exposure in detail, including defence cost, D&O implications, and reputational flow-through.
The practical consequence is that psychosocial risk in Victoria, as in every other Australian jurisdiction, is now a board-level obligation. A Victorian board unable to describe the organisation's top psychosocial hazards, the controls in place, and how effectiveness is measured is a board whose officers are exposed in the same way directors of organisations operating elsewhere in Australia are exposed. Whether the prosecution framework says "OHS" or "WHS" does not change that exposure.
What Victoria's framework means for multi-state employers
Victoria's OHS Act framework is the single biggest complication for organisations operating in multiple Australian jurisdictions. A compliance posture built against the model WHS Act does not automatically apply in Victoria, because Victoria does not use the model WHS Act.
The practical differences are narrower than they sound, and wider than they appear. The four-step risk management obligation is materially the same: identify, assess, control, review. The substantive duty to manage psychosocial risk is comparable. The penalty severity is in the same order of magnitude. What differs is the statutory terminology, the specific regulation references, and the guidance document a Victorian inspector will reference during a visit. An organisation whose risk register, control documentation, and policy suite is built exclusively around the WHS Act 2011 and model regulations will pass most of a Victorian inspection on substance but may fail on form if the documentation references the wrong legislation or uses terminology that does not map to the Victorian framework.
For organisations with Victorian operations, the workable approach is a compliance framework that operates against both the model WHS Act and the Victorian OHS Act simultaneously. That means documentation that references both statutory frameworks where relevant, controls that satisfy both regulatory schemes, and a board reporting structure that gives officers in Victoria the same line of sight officers in other jurisdictions now expect.
What this means for Victorian employers
Victorian employers sit at the intersection of a relatively new express regulation and a well-established prosecution precedent. The combination argues against waiting to see how enforcement develops before acting.
Systematic psychosocial compliance under the Victorian framework looks the same as it does elsewhere. Hazards are identified through a documented process, not assumed to be absent. Risks are assessed with evidence, not sentiment. Controls are mapped to specific hazards and selected based on what the 2017 Regulations and WorkSafe guidance identify as reasonably practicable. Evidence is generated, stored, and retrievable. Effectiveness is measured, and the whole loop runs continuously.
The alternative is reactive compliance: waiting until an incident, a complaint, or a WorkSafe visit forces a response. The Court Services Victoria case is the clearest possible illustration of what reactive compliance costs. Every element of the Victorian regulatory posture, from the no-transition commencement to the active WorkSafe enforcement program, is designed to move organisations from reactive to proactive.
For a more detailed walkthrough of what systematic psychosocial compliance looks like in practice, see our definitive guide to psychosocial compliance in Australia. Organisations with operations outside Victoria should also review how psychosocial compliance works in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, and the Commonwealth (Comcare) framework, each of which operates under different enforcement postures. The cost of psychosocial non-compliance covers the financial side: penalties, claims costs, and operational impact. For the specific process of identifying and assessing hazards in a way that meets the regulator's expectations, see our guide to conducting a psychosocial risk assessment.
Check your Victorian compliance readiness
Most Victorian employers have some of the pieces in place: a wellbeing program, an EAP, an annual engagement survey, a respectful workplace policy. Few have all the pieces, structured in the way a WorkSafe Victoria inspector expects to see them, and even fewer have documentation that references the Victorian OHS Act framework specifically rather than defaulting to model WHS terminology.
A 5-minute psychosocial compliance readiness survey will give you a sense of where your organisation stands against the current Victorian requirements, including the 1 December 2025 psychological health regulations and the OHS Act's general duty framework. If you would prefer a conversation, Harrison runs 20-minute compliance gap walkthroughs: no pitch, just a structured look at current posture against what WorkSafe Victoria is now asking for.