Category: 3. Business

Australia’s work health and safety (WHS) laws impose strict duties on employers, officers, and workers to ensure the health and safety of everyone in the workplace. Understanding these duties and applying them through robust governance frameworks is essential – particularly in high-risk environments such as aviation, shipping, mining, and construction, or in highly regulated industries such as banking, insurance, and superannuation.

Regulatory Framework

Australia operates under a harmonised WHS regime in most jurisdictions, based on the Model Work Health and Safety Act and Regulations. However, key differences exist in Victoria and Western Australia, which retain separate legislative schemes.

Primary federal legislation (harmonised jurisdictions):

• Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Cth) — applies to Commonwealth agencies and certain national workplaces (including Comcare-regulated entities).
• Equivalent state/territory WHS Acts — largely aligned with the model WHS laws in NSW, QLD, SA, TAS, ACT, and NT.

Non-harmonised jurisdictions:

• Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (Vic)
• Work Health and Safety Act 2020 (WA) — partially harmonised but with notable variations.

Duties and Responsibilities

For Employers

A person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) must:

• Ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and others affected by work.
• Implement safe systems of work, provide training, maintain safe plant and structures, and control workplace risks.

For Officers (Directors, Executives)

• Exercise due diligence to ensure the PCBU complies with WHS obligations, including:

  • Staying informed about WHS matters
  • Ensuring appropriate resources and processes for risk management
  • Verifying compliance

• For officers and boards operating in banking, insurance, and superannuation industries, additional obligations may arise under the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) Prudential Standards: CPS 220 (Risk Management) and CPS 510 (Governance).

For Workers

• Take reasonable care for their own safety
• Follow lawful and reasonable instructions
• Use personal protective equipment (PPE) and report hazards

State and Federal Legislative Comparison Table

Recommendations for Avoiding WHS Breaches

• Integrate WHS into Board Governance — align WHS KPIs with prudential and insurance risk metrics.
• Regular Safety Audits — tailored to industry-specific hazards (e.g., confined spaces, aviation maintenance, port operations).
• Contractual Risk Allocation — ensure WHS obligations are clearly allocated and monitored in contracts.
• Training and Competency Verification — especially for high-risk tasks and remote operations.
• Crisis and Incident Response Planning — cross-functional plans covering WHS, regulatory notifications, and insurance claims.

Final word

WHS compliance is not just about avoiding prosecution — it is about safeguarding your workforce, your reputation, and your licence to operate. Embedding safety into your governance, culture, and operational processes will deliver long-term resilience and protect against regulatory and commercial risk.

Clyde & Co’s Corporate Advisory team is working with global clients to align contracts, policies, and operational practices with Australia’s new Right to Disconnect laws. We support legal compliance, deliver global communications training, and help manage cross-border cultural expectations in a post-reform environment.

For further advice, contact the team at Clyde & Co.

By Emily Bary

Alphabet’s stock has already doubled off its 2025 lows, but an analyst is still upbeat about Google’s resilience in search and its growing presence in semiconductors

Alphabet’s cloud business can dramatically outgrow Amazon’s through 2027, according to a Loop Capital analyst.

The hottest “Magnificent Seven” stock of the year could keep climbing, according to an analyst who just turned bullish on Alphabet shares.

Rob Sanderson of Loop Capital said Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) has efficiently climbed the “wall of worry,” putting to bed fears that dogged the stock earlier this year. Sanderson is admittedly late to the game, with Alphabet’s stock roughly doubling off its 2025 lows and leading the Magnificent Seven group of megacap tech names with its 51% year-to-date gain, but he sees plenty of catalysts that could drive further price appreciation.

For one, the Google search business looks “as healthy as ever” – despite worries earlier this year about the threat posed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Don’t miss: These 13 tech stocks have grown profits rapidly – and they’re still on sale

“Continued strength is disproving concerns (or at least postponing concerns) that AI chatbots are encroaching on Google as a primary starting point for the information seeking journey of users,” Sanderson wrote. “Strength is impressive considering Amazon pulled out of search ads in July and outsized growth in insurance as a category was expected to normalize” against tougher comparisons.

And Alphabet certainly isn’t sitting still when it comes to its own artificial-intelligence efforts, including with its Gemini large language model. “Through the year, Gemini has closed or overtaken leading modelbenchmarks in key areas and the company is now flexing its distribution muscle,” Sanderson noted.

Now excitement is building for Gemini 3.0, the next iteration of the model, which launched Tuesday.

See more: Google’s Gemini 3 is finally here. Can it power Alphabet’s stock even higher?

That said, there are risks to Alphabet’s moves in AI. Even its CEO sees some “irrationality” in the current AI mania. “I think no company is going to be immune, including us,” he told BBC when asked how Google would fare if the AI bubble burst.

So far, AI has been a boon to Alphabet’s cloud business, which is another element of the Google story that excites Sanderson. He thinks that unit alone is worth more than $1 trillion to Google. The business “has been on a big upswing,” with its backlog more than doubling over a five-quarter period, he noted.

Google Cloud should be able to “meaningfully outgrow” Amazon’s (AMZN) AWS cloud business through 2027, according to Sanderson, though he acknowledged that Alphabet’s performance is coming off a revenue base less than half the size of its major rival’s.

He is also upbeat about Alphabet’s custom chips known as tensor processing units, which he sees “becoming a big deal” for the company and within the industry, while helping Google stand out to cloud customers.

“Impressive price-performance benchmarks are making the Google TPU a differentiated driver for the cloud business as the company makes this internal advantage on compute economics available to third-party customers,” Sanderson wrote.

He moved to a buy rating from a prior hold stance on Alphabet’s stock. Sanderson’s $320 target price is 12% above current levels.

Read: One of Warren Buffett’s last moves as Berkshire CEO was to buy this ‘Magnificent Seven’ tech stock

-Emily Bary

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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Gold steadied as investors weighed a decline in global equities, unease over lofty tech valuations and fading expectations of an interest-rate cut in the US.

Bullion was trading around $4,070 an ounce, having ended the previous session up 0.6%. A high-stakes earnings report from Nvidia Corp. due Wednesday will test investors’ nerves over stocks linked to artificial-intelligence developments. While gold often performs well when investors seek refuge from market turmoil, it can also suffer in the short term as traders are forced to unwind leveraged positions.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) in association with Conducttr, has published its Horizon Scan report 2025, the eagerly anticipated annual study analyzing the top risks and threats that organizations have faced over the past 12 months, and those that are expected to sit at the top of the agenda over the coming years.

Organizations are facing risks and disruptions that are more complex and interconnected than ever before, spanning digital, environmental, operational, and human dimensions, often occurring simultaneously and compounding one another.

Along with cybersecurity threats, technological failures, climate-related events, and supply chain vulnerabilities these all have the potential to disrupt operations, affect service delivery, and erode stakeholder confidence.

The report examines these trends, combining findings from both quantitative survey data and qualitative interviews with practitioners on the front lines of business continuity and resilience. Their insights highlight that efforts towards improved response measures and better compliance should be considerate of the health and safety of the workforce.

Safety and IT

In the past 12 months safety incidents and IT-related disruptions rank very highly, a trend that has continued for the past five years. Safety incidents come top, closely followed by cyberattacks, fraud/attempted fraud, security incidents, and IT and telecom outages. Interestingly, extreme weather is the single largest cause of disruption over the past 12 months for the first time since 2017.

Looking at the next 12 months, the top five concerns also have a distinct technology flavour. In order, they are: cyberattacks, extreme weather events, IT and telecom outages, data breaches, and third-party failure / critical infrastructure failure.

This mix of disruptions have a broad impact, affecting operational performance, staff morale and customer experience. Consequences affect both internal and external stakeholders, with growing concerns over staff mental health.

The near future outlook

The future threat landscape is a complex combination of digital challenges, climate risk and geopolitical uncertainty. In many cases, the adoption of digital solutions represents both an opportunity and a potential risk for organizations. The top concerns for organizations over the next five to 10 years are cyber security: 63.6%, climate risk: 40.7%, the role of AI: 30.5%, geopolitical changes: 28.8%, and supply chain issues: 26.3%.

Trend analysis

Trend analysis remains a key tool for understanding emerging threats and guiding resilience planning. Just under half of organizations conduct trend analyses by a central corporate function (47.9%), with 23,5% having a decentralized approach across departments. A fifth (21.1%) don’t conduct these at all.

To conduct trend analysis, organizations rely on a combination of internal assessments and external insights to inform their risk landscape understanding. Interpersonal interaction remains a valuable option to practitioners. Internal risk and threat assessments came in at 87.2%, with external reports and industry insight (such as this report) a close second (75.2%). In the interpersonal interaction bucket come participation in industry events and conferences at (55.6%) and collaboration with peers at 52.1%.

The report also covers some of the legislation approaches – the relationship of BCM programmes to ISO 22301, the benefits of ISO 22301 Certification, and takes a look at investment levels in business continuity & resilience programmes.

Belen Santa-Olalla, Chief Creative Officer at Conductrr, commented, ‘We are proud to support the BCI Horizon Scan Report 2025. Its findings echo what we see every crisis: resilience depends on people, not paperwork. When pressure rises, it is human clarity, confidence, and connection that carry organizations through. That is why we focus on helping teams rehearse real situations in safe, authentic and realistic ways. This report is a reminder that preparation only becomes powerful when people are given space to practise, learn, and grow together.’

Download the report

More on

LONDON, Nov 19 (Reuters) – Median pay settlements granted by British employers in the three months to the end of October rose to their highest so far this year at 3.3%, up from 3% in the three months to September.

Brightmine said the move reflected higher public sector pay deals which took effect in August and September.

Sign up here.

“Early indications suggest that 2026 pay awards are likely to remain steady – and potentially edge lower – as cost pressures continue to weigh on employers,” Brightmine manager Sheila Attwood said.

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