What WorkSafe Victoria is cracking down on in manufacturing — and how to be ready

If you run a factory or workshop in Victoria, here's a number worth sitting with: in 2025, WorkSafe Victoria issued more than $17 million in penalties for unsafe work, and manufacturing was the second-most prosecuted industry in the state — behind only construction.

That isn't a story about businesses being reckless. Most of the manufacturers we walk through are already safe operators who care about their people. The gap is almost never the safety itself — it's being able to prove it on the day someone asks.

What is WorkSafe actually cracking down on?

Look at where the prosecutions land and a clear pattern emerges. In 2025 the most common breaches behind enforcement were working at height, mobile plant (forklifts and the like), and unguarded or inadequately guarded machinery. If your floor has a press, a saw, a conveyor, a forklift, or anyone working above ground level, you are squarely in the zone WorkSafe is inspecting — and manufacturing is one of the five named priority sectors in its current strategy, with more inspections and enforcement on the way.

And if you're in Melbourne's south-east, it's closer to home than you might think: WorkSafe has put Dandenong — Victoria's manufacturing capital — squarely in its safety spotlight.

What does an inspector's visit actually test?

When WorkSafe arrives, the pressure isn't philosophical. It's specific and immediate:

1. Can you produce current records on the spot? Test-and-tag, plant registrations, forklift high risk work licences (HRWL), training and competency, the date of your last evacuation drill.
2. Is your dangerous machinery properly guarded and risk-assessed — with the paperwork to match?
3. When something went wrong before, can you show what you did about it? Incident records, the corrective actions, the sign-off.

For most manufacturers, answering those means a day of digging through folders, spreadsheets and someone's memory. That scramble — not the underlying safety — is what turns a routine visit into an improvement notice. Guarding is the one that comes up most often on a factory floor, and the order you have to choose a machine guard in is set out in the Regulations.

Being "audit-ready" is a system, not a binder

The businesses that sail through an inspection aren't the ones with the thickest safety manual. They're the ones whose compliance is live: every register, licence and due date in one place, updated as work happens, so the proof is a minute away, not a day away. That is what a workplace safety system is actually for.

That's the shift worth making — from safety that lives in paperwork and decays until the next audit, to safety that stays current on its own.

Where Ardmor fits

Ardmor is built for exactly this: Victorian manufacturers who are safe but stretched, and don't have a full-time safety manager to keep the proof current. Think of it as having a safety manager on call, backed by a system that does the daily watching for you.

It starts with a site assessment: we walk your floor, check your records against what the OHS Act 2004 (Vic) actually requires of a business your size, and hand you a live compliance score and a prioritised fix-list — the things an inspector would raise first.

If "would we be ready if WorkSafe walked in tomorrow?" is a question you can't answer in a sentence, that's the gap worth closing — before someone else asks it for you.

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This article is general information for Victorian manufacturers, not legal advice. Last updated: 10 July 2026.