In ‘Enough is Enough: Truckies Deserve a Safe Workplace Too’, Bernard Murphy articulates a frustration familiar to many in the heavy vehicle industry: that the systems regulating road safety unfairly concentrate accountability on professional drivers.
Heavy vehicle operators are subject to increasingly complex compliance expectations while sharing roadways – and, by extension, their working environment – with general motorists who are not held to comparable standards of safety or enforcement.
Murphy highlights several issues. Heavy vehicle drivers are highly scrutinised, yet light vehicle users escape equivalent obligations. Regulatory attention and resources are disproportionately allocated, leaving general motorists inconsistently policed.
Burnout, low morale, and double standards are driving experienced professionals out of the sector. And despite persistent calls for reform, policy has stagnated.
Murphy doesn’t argue this as a lawyer, but the legal question is unavoidable: If a truck is a workplace, what obligations do others have when interacting with it?
The NTARC data suggests the question is urgent: in up to 78 per cent of fatal crashes involving a truck and another vehicle, the other vehicle is at fault.
When is a road a workplace?
Murphy is correct that a heavy vehicle is legally recognised as a workplace under Section 8 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW). The definition has been judicially extended to cover areas affected by the work undertaken in that space, as established in Inspector Campbell v James Gordon Hitchcock. However, this does not mean that the road becomes a workplace for all users.
Section 29 of the Act sets out duties for “other persons at the workplace,” such as visitors or contractors. These obligations apply only where a person is physically present at a workplace and engaged in activities under the direction or control of a PCBU (Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking).
A light vehicle driver on a public road is not in a workplace relationship with the truck or its driver. They have no employment, contractual, or visitor connection, nor are they subject to lawful instruction by the PCBU.
There is no practical or legal mechanism by which a truck driver could issue enforceable directions to surrounding road users. WHS duties therefore do not extend to members of the public operating in a shared roadway.
WHS law is not a general public safety law. Applying strict liability offences designed for work environments to general road users would introduce incoherence and enforcement risk.
Dangerous or negligent light vehicle behaviour around trucks should continue to be regulated under transport legislation, not workplace law.
Road safety duties lie elsewhere
Statutes such as the Road Transport Act 2013 (NSW) and its equivalents define and penalise dangerous driving behaviour: tailgating, unsafe overtaking, failing to maintain control, and driving while fatigued or distracted.
These frameworks are proportionate to their public safety purpose. They incorporate evidentiary standards and procedural safeguards that WHS law was never designed to provide in this context.
Murphy’s instincts are correct – light vehicle behaviour around trucks is under-regulated – but the correct response is better road enforcement, not stretching workplace legislation beyond its mandate.
The enforcement system: unequal and incomplete
The findings of Casey, Miles-Johnson, and Stevens (2025) in Lack of Consistency in Truck Driver Fatigue Management confirm many of Murphy’s concerns. Their study, based on interviews with law enforcement officers (LEOs) and transport regulation agents (TRAs), identifies key systemic weaknesses in how truck driver fatigue (TDF) laws are enforced.
Training for LEOs is inconsistent and often insufficient. Many officers receive only minimal or outdated training in TDF enforcement, sometimes no more than a few hours, and frequently with no structured follow-up.
In the absence of confidence, some officers use discretion to avoid fatigue-related enforcement altogether. They may choose not to stop trucks, avoid checking logbooks, or refrain from asking relevant questions.
Operational priorities also interfere. Officers are routinely reassigned from fatigue enforcement to higher-profile or time-critical tasks, such as traffic collisions or general policing duties.
This deprioritisation of fatigue undermines the law’s deterrent potential. Compounding this is the lack of direct exposure: officers who have not witnessed fatigue-related crashes often fail to see the issue as a priority.
Professional development is also patchy. Officers frequently rely on informal learning, shadowing colleagues or self-study rather than consistent, agency-wide training. Enforcement outcomes vary widely across jurisdictions.
Some agencies provide structured guidance, camera access, and fatigue modelling tools, while others operate with minimal support. The result is a fractured system with significant variation in enforcement consistency, capability, and intent.
Adding complexity to a fragile system
Despite these capability and consistency problems, amendments to the HVNL now propose to add a new offence: a duty not to drive unless “fit.”
This reframes the current prohibition on driving while fatigued into a broader requirement modelled on section 28 of the Model WHS Act.
According to the National Transport Commission (NTC), the provision aims to empower drivers to assess and act on their own fitness to drive.
But criminalising an individual’s self-assessment does not constitute empowerment. Ironically, if the creation of a duty would establish the right to stop driving when unwell, section 28 of the WHS legislation would already provide it. Adding a prosecutable offence does not support that right; it turns it into a potential liability.
The proposed offence would further concentrate regulatory pressure on drivers, who already account for nearly 90 per cent of HVNL prosecutions. The standard of “fitness” is conceptually vague and legally undefined.
Unlike fatigue, which has prescriptive limits, fitness could refer to anything from illness or medication use to emotional wellbeing. Without clear evidentiary thresholds or investigative protocols, enforcement becomes subjective and inconsistent.
There is also no existing enforcement infrastructure to support such a duty. Officers already struggle to enforce existing fatigue rules, as evidenced by the Casey study. Creating a broader, vaguer offence will only deepen enforcement confusion.
Even the NTC’s rationale – that the offence empowers drivers to make safety-based decisions – fails on its own terms.
Empowerment does not require criminal sanction. Where is the evidence that criminalising unfitness will make drivers more likely to stop or feel safer in doing so?
What this amendment introduces is a symbolic provision, unsupported by enforcement practice.
Where to next?
Murphy’s conclusion – that responsibility for road safety cannot rest solely on drivers – is backed by evidence. Enforcement systems are stretched. Regulatory coverage is uneven. The supply chain and general public remain under-scrutinised.
Fixing these issues does not require more offences. It requires clarity in legislative scope, so that WHS laws remain focused on workplaces and so that road laws govern road use.
It also requires investment in enforcement capacity, with consistent fatigue training and access to supporting tools.
The regulatory burden should be better distributed, holding upstream supply chain actors and high-risk motorists to account. Above all, reform should be cautious and precise: legal obligations must be clear, enforceable, and proportionate to the risks they seek to address.
Shared roads require shared responsibility. But responsibility must be legally coherent, operationally realistic, and enforced fairly. That is the next frontier for road safety reform.
About the author:
Ray Hassall is the former Executive Director Statutory Compliance at the NHVR. He left that role at the end of 2024 after 11 years and now heads up Lincoln Regulatory Consulting which tries to help people work out which parts of the regulatory system matter and how they can best build their safety and compliance responses. Hassall believes that improving how serious incidents are investigated can support both safety and fairness. He has worked with operators, investigators, and frontline regulators, and brings a grounded understanding of how the system works – and where it can improve.