Most workplace safety plans handle plant, chemicals, traffic and working at height carefully, then stop at the building line. The trees over the car park, the smoko area, the playground or the loading yard sit outside the document entirely. That is the gap, and it is a documented liability exposure rather than a theoretical one.
What section 19 actually says
Section 19 of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Qld) creates the primary duty of care. Three parts of it matter here.
Section 19(1) requires a person conducting a business or undertaking to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers engaged by the person, and of workers whose activities are influenced or directed by the person, while they are at work.
Section 19(2) extends the duty beyond workers: the PCBU must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, “that the health and safety of other persons is not put at risk from work carried out as part of the conduct of the business or undertaking”. That covers visitors, guests, contractors, students, residents and members of the public.
Section 19(3)(a) then makes the content of the duty explicit. It includes “the provision and maintenance of a work environment without risks to health and safety”.
“Work environment” is not the building. A tree standing over an area where people work, walk, park or gather is part of that environment, and its condition is part of maintaining it.
“Reasonably practicable” is a weighing exercise
The duty is not absolute. It is qualified by what is reasonably practicable, and that phrase has a settled meaning: you weigh the likelihood of the hazard occurring, the degree of harm that would result, what the person knows or ought reasonably to know about the hazard and ways to eliminate or minimise it, the availability and suitability of controls, and the cost.
Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.
- You cannot weigh what you have not measured. A defence built on “the trees looked fine” has nothing on the scales. A quantified annual probability of harm does.
- What you ought reasonably to know counts against you. Not having looked is not a defence. The standard is what a reasonable duty holder in your position ought to have known.
What a court has treated as reasonably practicable
In November 2024 a Victorian holiday park operator was fined $475,000 after a falling branch killed a camper. The jury found it was reasonably practicable to reduce the risk by engaging an arborist to complete annual tree assessments and following the recommendations. Two facts drove the verdict: no general arborist assessment since 2015, and no documented system for inspecting trees or policy on inspection frequency.
That case was decided under Victorian law, which is not harmonised with the WHS Act. But the “reasonably practicable” analysis is materially the same, and it gives a concrete benchmark: for a site with significant trees over occupied areas, an annual documented assessment is the sort of control a tribunal of fact has already found to be reasonable.
Where the gap usually sits
In practice the exposure clusters in a few predictable places:
- Staff car parks and smoko areas under mature eucalypts
- Playgrounds, sports fields and spectator areas at schools and clubs
- Camp sites, cabins and access roads at holiday parks
- Outdoor dining, courtyards and walkways at hospitality and aged care sites
- Laydown yards and access tracks on industrial and rural sites
- Anywhere a contractor is directed to work beneath a tree
What closes it
Four things, and none of them is expensive relative to the exposure:
- A documented inspection policy stating who assesses, to what method, and how often. Write down the cycle even before the first inspection.
- A tree risk register — each tree recorded, with a quantified risk of harm, not a general condition note.
- A prioritised action list with timeframes, and evidence the actions were completed.
- Re-inspection on the stated cycle, and after significant storm or fire events.
All four are ordinary safety-management practice. The only reason trees are usually missing from the system is that nobody assigned them to anyone.