On 25 November 2024 the Melbourne County Court fined a holiday park operator $475,000 after a falling branch killed a camper. It is the clearest recent statement of what a court expects from an organisation with trees over people, and it is worth reading carefully — because the operator was not convicted of getting an assessment wrong. They were convicted of not having a system.
What happened
The incident occurred in March 2021 at a Victorian holiday park. The operator was charged with one count of failing to ensure the workplace was safe and without risks to health, and the matter went to a jury.
What the prosecution established
Two findings did the damage:
- The operator had not engaged an arborist for a general assessment since 2015 — roughly six years before the incident.
- The operator had no documented system for inspecting trees and no policy on how frequently they should be inspected.
The jury found it was reasonably practicable for the park to reduce the risk of falling branches by engaging an arborist to complete annual tree assessments of trees at the site, and by following the arborist's recommendations.
The number that should worry every operator
After the incident, an inspection of the site found that of 277 trees, 137 required risk mitigation work and 85 needed attention within one year.
That is not a park that had one bad tree. That is a park where roughly half the tree population needed work and nobody had looked. The gap between "we haven't had a problem" and "we have 137 problems" was a single inspection.
How it maps onto the Queensland duty
Section 19(1) of the Queensland Act requires a person conducting a business or undertaking to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers. Section 19(2) extends that to other persons — guests, visitors, members of the public — who must not be put at risk from work carried out as part of the business. Section 19(3)(a) makes explicit that the duty includes “the provision and maintenance of a work environment without risks to health and safety”.
A caravan park, a school, a club, a retirement village and an industrial yard are all workplaces. The trees over them are part of the work environment.
The four things the case says to do
- Have an inspection cycle, in writing. The absence of a documented policy was cited directly. An annual cycle was what the jury found reasonably practicable for a site of this kind.
- Have it done by someone qualified in risk assessment, and keep the report. An undocumented walk-around by a groundskeeper is not a system.
- Act on the recommendations. The jury's finding was explicitly about engaging an assessor and following the recommendations. A report in a drawer may be worse than no report, because it establishes knowledge of the risk.
- Keep the paper. The defence to a reasonably-practicable allegation is a documented, reasoned decision made before the event — not a recollection formed after it.
An annual documented assessment for a site of that size is a four-figure cost. The fine was $475,000, before legal costs, and before whatever the incident did to the operator's insurance, occupancy and reputation. A person also died.
If you operate a site with trees over people
The question is not whether your trees look healthy. It is whether you can produce, today, a dated document showing that a qualified assessor examined them, quantified the risk, made recommendations, and that you acted on them. If you cannot, the gap the court identified in this case is the gap you have.