Stop Work Authority

What is Stop Work Authority?

Stop Work Authority means you can halt an activity as soon as you observe an unsafe condition, behaviour, or practice. You don’t need to be a supervisor, and you don’t need tenure or status for your concern to matter.

The stop stays in place until the hazard is addressed, mitigated, or verified as safe by competent people. If your process allows work to restart without resolving the concern, SWA becomes theatre rather than control.

SWA represents a shift in who holds the “brake.” Historically, stopping a job was treated as management’s prerogative, and workers could be punished for slowing production.

Modern Australian WHS law recognises that the people closest to the work are often best placed to detect what planning missed. The right to intervene is no longer a favour—it's embedded in the legal fabric of the workplace.

But a legal right doesn’t automatically become real behaviour. The gap between the de jure right to stop and the de facto willingness to use it is one of the hardest problems in contemporary safety management.

From right to duty

In a mature system, you don’t treat SWA as optional. You treat it as a duty: if you see a serious risk and stay silent, you’re allowing the hazard to remain in play.

Practically, SWA functions as a final administrative “circuit breaker.” It sits within your hierarchy of controls as the last step that prevents drift into catastrophic failure when conditions change.

How Stop Work Authority works in practice

SWA only scales when it’s operationalised into a clear, repeatable routine that everyone understands. Your people should know exactly what to do after the stop—especially how decisions are made and who is involved.

Integration with Safe Work Method Statements

For high-risk construction work, a SWMS is a legal requirement. SWA is the practical mechanism that enforces the script when reality deviates from the plan.

Your SWMS should explicitly state: “If the controls listed here cannot be implemented, or if conditions change, work must STOP immediately.” That single line gives workers permission—and a clear trigger.

Train people that any deviation from the SWMS is a stop-work trigger. If the SWMS specifies a scissor lift and the job is being done from a ladder, SWA is mandatory.

This is SWA in its most useful form: the field-level execution of dynamic risk assessment. It keeps method statements “alive” instead of letting them become static paperwork.

Why it matters

SWA is both a legal protection and a business necessity. It reduces the chance that a single ignored hazard becomes an injury, fatality, regulatory shutdown, or litigation event.

The Australian legal framework

Stop Work Authority in Australia is supported by robust but complex legislation. If you operate across state lines, you need to understand how the right to cease work is applied in each jurisdiction.

Section 84: The Model WHS Act

In NSW, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, ACT, Northern Territory, Tasmania, and Commonwealth jurisdictions, the right to cease work is explicitly codified in Section 84 of the Work Health and Safety Act. This section provides the statutory engine for SWA.

Under Section 84, a worker may cease or refuse to carry out work if they have a reasonable concern that doing the work would expose them to a serious risk to their health or safety, emanating from an immediate or imminent exposure to a hazard.

The Victorian difference

Victoria operates under the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic) rather than the harmonised Model WHS Act. There is no direct equivalent to Section 84 granting an individual statutory right to cease work.

Instead, Victoria relies heavily on Section 74 (HSR-directed cessation) and common law rights. Individual workers who stop work in Victoria do so primarily under their common law right to refuse dangerous instructions and the employer’s general duty to provide a safe workplace.

Health and Safety Representatives

Under Section 85 of the Model WHS Act, an HSR (Health and Safety Representative) can direct a worker or group of workers to cease work if they have a reasonable concern about serious risk. HSRs typically must consult with the PCBU first, unless the risk is so serious and immediate that consultation isn’t reasonable.

This matters because it shifts the burden away from a potentially vulnerable individual and onto an elected representative with specific training and stronger protections against discrimination.

Protection from adverse action

SWA is meaningless if using it costs someone their job. Australian employment law addresses this through the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) and General Protections.

Section 84 confers a statutory workplace right, and it is unlawful to take “adverse action” against an employee because they exercised that right. If you dismiss, demote, or discriminate against someone for stopping work under Section 84, you expose the business to serious legal risk.

Case law: McNamara v Era Pacific

The 2016 case of McNamara v Era Pacific Pty Ltd is a clear example. Mr McNamara refused to perform a heavy machinery movement task because he believed the proposed method was unsafe and lacked appropriate equipment, and he relied on Queensland’s Section 84 right.

After his employment was terminated, the Federal Circuit Court found in his favour. The Court accepted that Section 84 is a workplace right, that he had a reasonable concern about a serious risk, and that the employer took adverse action because of that exercise.

The takeaway is practical: courts will look behind the stated reason for dismissal if the facts suggest retaliation for safety-related refusal. If you want SWA used, your response has to be protective, consistent, and documented.

The business case

Critics often view SWA as lost productivity. That framing ignores the cost curve of incidents, investigations, regulator intervention, and long-tail reputational damage.

Safe Work Australia's 2024 statistics provide sobering context. In 2023, 188 workers died from traumatic injuries, and the cost of work-related injury and disease is estimated at over $61.8 billion annually.

A stop-work event might cost $1,000 in time. A serious injury can cost hundreds of thousands, and a fatality can trigger fines, civil litigation, and long-term contract loss.

The arithmetic heavily favours the stop. Safe sites are productive sites because the “rework” after an incident is far larger than the time lost to prevention.

Common challenges

You can write SWA into policy and still never see it used. The blockers are usually cultural, not legal.

Production pressure

The most pervasive barrier is the conflict between safety and production. Even when your organisation says “Safety First,” the day-to-day reality can reward speed and output.

When these goals collide, production pressure often wins because the feedback is immediate. The penalty for missing a deadline is obvious, while the penalty for unsafe work may not appear unless something goes wrong.

Power distance and authority gradients

In hierarchical cultures, junior staff can feel culturally inhibited from questioning senior staff. SWA requires you to flatten that gradient in practice, not just in slogans.

If people believe stopping work will be treated as insubordination, they’ll stay quiet. In that environment, SWA becomes a management prerogative rather than a safety control.

Psychological safety

Psychological safety means people feel able to speak up without fear of retribution or humiliation. It’s distinct from physical safety, but it determines whether SWA is used in the field.

In low psychological safety cultures, SWA becomes a “paper tiger.” If someone raises a concern that turns out to be a false alarm, they must be thanked for vigilance—not ridiculed for “wasting time.”

Stop Work Authority and psychosocial hazards

Australian WHS has evolved to treat psychosocial hazards—bullying, harassment, fatigue, traumatic events, and unreasonable job demands—on the same regulatory footing as physical hazards. That changes what “serious risk” can look like on the ground.

Can you stop work for mental health risks?

Increasingly, yes. “Health” in WHS legislation includes psychological health, so SWA can apply where you reasonably believe the work exposes you to a serious psychological risk from an immediate or imminent hazard.

For example, aggressive verbal abuse, threats of violence, or sexual harassment can be immediate exposure to a psychosocial hazard. In those situations, stopping work can be a legitimate way to remove yourself from the hazard.

Severe fatigue can also create immediate risk, especially where impairment increases the likelihood of a serious incident. Continuing to work can endanger you and others.

Challenges with psychosocial SWA

Psychosocial hazards can be more subjective than physical hazards. A machine guard is present or absent; an unreasonable workload or toxic interaction is more open to interpretation.

Stigma compounds the problem. If workers fear they’ll be labelled “soft” for speaking up, they’ll avoid using SWA even when the risk is real.

For acute hazards like violence or traumatic exposure, the “imminence” is clearer. The legal framework increasingly supports cessation for psychological protection when the threshold is met.

Best practices

If you want SWA to be used, you need more than a policy statement. You need predictable leadership behaviour after the stop, and you need proof that raising hazards leads to action.

Strong programs usually share a few design principles:

• Make triggers explicit: define what “serious risk” and “immediate or imminent” look like in your context, with examples.
• Close the loop: document the hazard, the decision, and the corrective action so people can see it wasn’t ignored.
• Protect the person who stopped: coach leaders to respond with curiosity first, not defensiveness or blame.
• Measure quality, not silence: zero stops can be a red flag; pair counts with resolution time and workforce perception data.

Keep your focus on learning and control effectiveness. If SWA becomes a compliance exercise—or worse, a reason to punish “troublemakers”—you’ll drive hazards underground.

Lessons from Dreamworld

The 2016 Dreamworld tragedy, which claimed four lives at the Thunder River Rapids ride, is a stark example of what “no real SWA” looks like. The ride broke down multiple times that day, yet operations resumed to maintain throughput.

A robust SWA culture would have required the ride to remain closed until the root cause was fixed. Instead, repeated restarts normalised deviance and created the conditions for catastrophe.

The inquest found junior operators felt pressure to keep operating and were told “not to worry” about the emergency stop. They lacked the training and authority to override production pressure, and the authority gradient was too steep.

The Coroner found a systemic failure of management. The lesson is blunt: without SWA, production pressure can turn a manageable fault into a fatality.