Effective Site Supervision on Construction Projects

About this course.

A site supervisor is responsible for making sure the work on their site is carried out safely, correctly, on program and in accordance with the drawings, specifications, contract and law — and for coordinating the people, plant and materials needed to achieve that. In WHS terms the supervisor is usually a worker who acts on behalf of the PCBU, exercising day-to-day control of the workplace; they are the point where the PCBU's legal duties are put into practice. They are not usually the PCBU or an officer themselves, but their decisions directly affect whether the PCBU meets its duties, so understanding the duty chain is fundamental to the role.

The starting point is to understand that construction work in Australia is governed by a work health and safety framework built on model laws. Safe Work Australia develops the model WHS Act, the model WHS Regulations and the model Codes of Practice, but Safe Work Australia does not enforce them. Each state and territory enacts its own version of the WHS laws and its own regulator enforces them — for example SafeWork NSW, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, and the regulators in South Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, together with the Commonwealth scheme under Comcare. Western Australia has adopted the model framework through its own WHS legislation. Victoria is the important exception: it has not adopted the model WHS laws and instead operates under its own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, regulated by WorkSafe Victoria. The concepts in this course are broadly similar across jurisdictions, but a supervisor must know which Act applies to their site and read that Act and its regulations, because terminology and detail vary.