David Penberthy: SafeWork SA has failed to investigate, failed to prosecute workplace deaths

The government wants to hold employers accountable for workplace deaths. It should check the very agency charged with doing just that, writes David Penberthy.

Earlier this week the newly-elected Malinauskas government announced that unscrupulous employers who cut corners on safety could face industrial manslaughter charges in the event that one of their workers dies on the job.

It is in my view a fair policy and one which other states already have in place. While some employers baulk at the idea, arguing that they’re the ones taking commercial risks to provide other people with jobs, there is no reason why sloppy or penny-pinching bosses should be let off the hook if their ineptitude or indifference causes someone’s death.

This is what Attorney-General Kyam Maher said on Monday when announcing the changes: “Every South Australian and family should know that if you go to work, you should expect to come home at the end safely.”

Commendable stuff, but with one key flaw: A glaring lack of consistency involving one of the state government’s own departments.

To make matters worse, it’s the very department that is tasked with ultimate oversight for the safety of workers in this state.

This is despite the fact that exactly one year ago Coroner Anthony Schapel brought down an utterly damming report into Gayle Woodford’s death that has more red flags than a May Day parade when it comes to the wholly inadequate safety arrangements surrounding her employment.

Mrs Woodford was a happily married 56-year-old mother of two who was driven by a sense of civic duty. She and her husband Keith moved to the APY Lands where she worked as a nurse, the pair living in the impoverished and dysfunctional town of Fregon. That town was described in the coroner’s report as a place where violence was such an entrenched daily occurrence that some medical staff believed the entire community should be wound up on safety grounds.

Fregon was also the place Mrs Woodford met her fate, when she was abducted, raped and murdered by lifelong sex offender Dudley Davey, who somehow got to Mrs Woodford while she was trying to tend to him from a steel security cage installed for her own safety outside her own home.

APY Lands man, Dudley Davey, murderer of Gayle Woodford. Picture: Channel 7

The coroner heard a litany of evidence from former nurses who worked at Fregon as well as the former head of policing in the APY Lands. All these witnesses talked about how they had repeatedly raised security concerns with their relevant managers at the governing health body, the Nganampa Health Council.

Their concerns included that nurses should never work alone but needed a partner with them at all times, be it another nurse, a security guard or a police officer. They also believed the OH&S policies governing their work were confusing and not enforced. Chief among these was the confusion about whether the security cages used for protection at their homes should ever be unlocked and opened to tend to patients.

The evidence from police was especially damning. The former head of the APY Lands SAPOL unit, Sergeant Anne Yeomans, said she had warned the Nganampa Health Council that not even police officers attended jobs in the APY Lands without a partner, and that the NHC should follow suit.

Coroner Schapel accepted that this advice was made “specifically” to the NHC manager David Busuttil after a 2012 incident when another nurse was indecently assaulted while working alone in the remote APY Lands town of Watturre in 2012. Four years later, Gayle Woodford died while working alone.

No action

Despite all this evidence – and much more than space prevents me from documenting here – SafeWork SA has decided that it will not proceed with a prosecution against the Nganampa Health Council.

On this, you could say by way of understatement that SafeWork SA has got form.

Indeed, when it comes to dogged investigative conduct, you’ll find Eliot Ness at one end of the spectrum, and SafeWork SA at the other.

Remember, this is the same organisation that was given a thorough and deserved bucketing by ICAC back in 2018 over a string of bungled prosecutions. These included that of Jorge Castillo-Riffo who died while operating a scissor lift during the construction of the new Royal Adelaide Hospital in 2014. For some baffling reason, SafeWork SA inspectors were unavailable the day Mr Castillo-Riffo was fatally injured and did not attend until the next day, by which time the scissor lift had been removed and the site could not be checked.

SafeWork SA also dropped charges against the inspectors who approved the defective ride at the Royal Adelaide Show which killed eight-year-old Adelene Leong in 2014.

Construction worker Jorge Castillo-Riffo, 54, died in November 2014 after he was crushed while using a scissor lift at the Adelaide Royal Adelaide Hospital site. Supplied

State Coroner Mark Johns and other lawyers viewing the scissor lift that killed Jorge Castillo-Riffo at the Ottaway police compound. Picture: Dean Martin

They also bungled the investigation into the two women who were crushed and seriously injured when a steel gate fell on them on at a North Tce construction site in 2016.

At the time, SafeWork SA executive director Martin Campbell apologised to those two women.

I now have letters where he has also apologised to Keith Woodford for the extraordinary fact that when Gayle Woodford died, SafeWork SA didn’t even record her death as a workplace incident.

Having read the Coroner’s report, the ICAC report, and a mountain of correspondence between the Woodfords, their lawyer and SafeWork SA, I’d say that SafeWork SA seems to be better at apologising and back-pedalling than it is at investigating and prosecuting.

If the new government wants to get consistent about worker’s safety, it cannot threaten to prosecute rogue private sector employers while one of its own government departments is allowing a public servant such as Gayle Woodford to be killed without legal consequence.