HR, Safety and Compliance for Labour Hire Businesses

Labour hire is one of the few arrangements in Australia where the same worker, doing the same task, puts two separate businesses in front of a regulator at once. That is how the model Work Health and Safety Act is built, and it is the part of this subject that gets read wrongly more than any other.

The conversation I have most often with labour hire agency owners starts the same way: the host runs that site, so the host carries it. That is not what the Act says, and the gap between those two positions is where the expensive surprises sit.

This post is the law half: which jurisdictions require a licence, what the WHS duty puts on you, which workers compensation scheme picks up a claim, and what a Fair Work Inspector can ask for. The operational half is in Keeping your labour hire business organised and compliant, which answers how placement-ready records and the renewal cycle are run. None of this is legal advice.

Four Jurisdictions Run a Labour Hire Licensing Scheme.

Each has its own Act and its own regulator. New South Wales, Western Australia, Tasmania, and the Northern Territory have no scheme as at September 2026.

• Queensland. The Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (Qld), enforced by the Labour Hire Licensing Compliance Unit within the Office of Industrial Relations.¹
• Victoria. The Labour Hire Licensing Act 2018 (Vic), administered by the Labour Hire Authority, which publishes a Labour Hire Licence Register that hosts are expected to check.²
• South Australia. The Labour Hire Licensing Act 2017 (SA),⁴ with applications lodged through Consumer and Business Services.³
• Australian Capital Territory. The Labour Hire Licensing Act 2020 (ACT),⁶ which commenced on 27 May 2021 and is run by WorkSafe ACT.⁵

South Australia is the one to check if you have not looked recently. Its scheme used to reach five sectors only. SafeWork SA records that the expanded laws commenced on 29 January 2026 and now capture providers in every industry, with a 6-month grace period that ended on 29 July 2026.³ A professional services firm or a specialist recruiter that never thought of itself as labour hire can now sit inside the definition.

A licence in one jurisdiction does not travel. WorkSafe ACT answers that directly: a provider already licensed in another state or territory still needs an ACT licence, because different legislation applies in each place.⁵ Plan for a separate application, fee, and renewal cycle wherever you supply or arrange labour.

The Penalties Land on the Client as Well as the Provider.

In Queensland, providing labour hire services without a licence carries a maximum penalty of AU$518,100 for a corporation, or AU$178,571.80 or 3 years imprisonment for an individual, on the penalty unit values in force from 1 July 2026. Entering into an arrangement with a provider who does not hold a licence carries exactly the same maximum, and that offence belongs to the client, not the agency.¹ Victoria puts it in plain numbers on its page for hosts: a host that engages an unlicensed provider can face penalties exceeding AU$660,000 for a corporation and AU$160,000 for an individual, and can also be liable for that provider’s contraventions under workplace and migration law.²

Read that from your client’s side of the table. Your licence is not paperwork you keep for yourself; it is what protects the business that hires you. The Labour Hire Authority tells hosts not to rely on paper documentation, which could be illegitimate or out of date, and to check the register instead.² Expect a tender to ask for the licence number, not a scan of the certificate.

Both of You Hold the WHS Duty, and It Cannot Be Moved.

The model WHS Act, version dated 5 December 2025, says a person conducting a business or undertaking must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers engaged, or caused to be engaged by the person, and of workers whose activities in carrying out work are influenced or directed by the person.⁷ The first limb catches you. The second catches your host. Both apply to the same worker on the same shift.

Three short sections settle what follows.

• Section 14. A duty cannot be transferred to another person.⁷
• Section 16. More than one person can concurrently have the same duty, each must comply to the standard the Act requires even though another duty holder has it too, and each must discharge it to the extent they can influence and control the matter, or would have been able to but for an agreement purporting to limit that capacity.⁷
• Section 46. Where more than one person has a duty for the same matter, each must consult, co-operate, and co-ordinate activities with the others so far as is reasonably practicable.⁷

That last clause in section 16 is the one to read twice. A contract term that strips your ability to influence a matter does not strip the duty; the Act measures you against the control you would have had. Safe Work Australia puts it plainly: labour hire and host businesses cannot contract out of or transfer their WHS duties to each other or to another party.⁸

What That Means on a Monday Morning.

Shared duties are easy to nod at and hard to run, because on any given morning exactly one person has to do each job. Safe Work Australia’s labour hire guidance divides them more clearly than most contracts do.⁸

Who inducts. Both of you, for different things. You must make sure workers have the relevant qualifications, experience, and necessary licence to carry out the work, and must provide any additional training the particular work requires plus a safety induction setting out WHS policies, procedures, and practices. The host runs the induction for the hazards of its own site. Neither substitutes for the other, which is why a host induction belongs in your record as a requirement in its own right rather than as a note in the account file. That is what a training and induction workflow is for.

Who supervises. The host directs the work day to day, but information, instruction, training, and supervision sit on the list of things both parties must work together to ensure. In practice that means a named contact of yours who visits, and a route by which a worker raises a concern with you rather than with the supervisor standing over them.

Who provides the personal protective equipment. Suitable PPE, plus instruction on how to use, store, and maintain it, is on the same shared list. Agree in writing which of you supplies each item before the first shift, because the item nobody agreed on is the item nobody brings.

Who investigates. Both. The guidance is specific that agreed processes must be in place for informing the regulator of notifiable incidents and for consulting workers before decisions that affect their health and safety. Settle before the placement who calls the regulator, who preserves the site, who takes the statements, and who tells the other party.

Workers Compensation Follows the Worker, Not the Site.

The agency is the employer, so the agency carries the policy. The question that trips people up is which state’s scheme responds when a worker who lives and usually works in one state is placed in another for a fortnight.

A state of connection test decides it, and Safe Work Australia applies three tests in order: the state or territory in which the worker usually works in that employment; failing that, where the worker is usually based for the purposes of that employment; failing that, where the employer’s principal place of business in Australia is located. Only if none of the three answers it, and the worker is not entitled to compensation under the laws of a place outside Australia, does the employment connect with the state where the injury happened.⁹

So a single interstate placement usually does not change the scheme, which is why most employers do not need multiple policies for workers temporarily working interstate.⁹ But a worker whose placements have drifted permanently into another state may have moved under the first test without anyone noticing. Raise that with your insurer, not with a claims manager after an injury.

The Fair Work Side, and What an Inspector Can Ask For.

You are the employer. Every Fair Work obligation that attaches to an employer attaches to you, wherever the worker is standing.

Right to work. Check it against the source rather than a photocopy. The Department of Home Affairs runs VEVO, which lets a registered organisation check a visa holder’s details and conditions online, once the holder has given permission, through an ImmiAccount.¹⁰ A visa condition can change between the day you filed the document and the day the worker starts.

Award and classification. Awards cover employers and employees according to the industry they work in and the type of work performed, and the Fair Work Ombudsman warns that you cannot rely on an award’s title to decide whether it covers someone; read the coverage clause, usually clause 4.¹¹ Classification then sets the minimum pay rate, and it moves when the role changes, when a worker takes on supervision, or when they finish a relevant qualification.¹¹ In labour hire the work changes with the placement, so this belongs at the point of placement, not in an annual review. That makes it an operations question as much as a payroll one.

Pay slips. Within one working day of pay day, even when the worker is on leave, carrying the pay period, gross and net pay, the ordinary hourly rate and hours worked at it, loadings and allowances, deductions, and superannuation with the fund named.¹²

Records. Time and wages records kept for 7 years, readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector, legible, in English, and not altered except to correct an error.¹³ The consequence worth knowing is the reversal: where records were not kept or not made available for inspection, an employer may have to prove to a court that it did not underpay the employee.¹³

You Are Judged on What You Can Prove, Not on What You Believed.

Every obligation above resolves into the same question, and it arrives by email on a Thursday. A host’s safety manager asks whether a named worker was cleared to be on their site on a particular Tuesday. An inspector asks for a worker’s records across a placement that ended two years ago.

None of those asks what you believed at the time. They ask what the record shows: what that site required then, what the worker held, when each document was approved, and when each one expired. That is the case for holding one live record per worker against the requirements of each host, and for pushing the check forward to site access, where an answer is still worth something.

The licence gets you into the market. The duty stays with you the whole time you are in it. The record is the only one of the three you can improve this week.