SafeWork NSW is now prosecuting officers personally, and psychosocial risk is next

On 2 August, SafeWork NSW secured a $195,500 combined conviction against Myra Corporate Pty Ltd and its sole director, Peter Fusarelli, after a worker was seriously injured by hydrogen sulphide exposure during biogas experiments. Four days later, on 6 August, Crystal Touch Masonry Pty Ltd and its director Raad Patti were fined $75,000 and $60,000 respectively over a respirable crystalline silica exposure incident. Both prosecutions used section 27(1) of the model WHS Act, the personal due diligence duty that sits on officers, directors and executives independently of the company's own liability. Neither case involved a psychosocial hazard. Both are physical and chemical exposure incidents, and NSW's post-Code enforcement record remains, so far, entirely physical: 11 convictions and $2,000,100 in cumulative fines since 1 July, zero of them psychosocial. But the mechanism matters more than the subject matter here. Fusarelli and Patti are the second and third s.27(1) officer-duty convictions since the Code became enforceable, following Anthony Taliano on 15 July. SafeWork NSW now has an established, repeatable pattern of naming officers personally, not just the company, once it has the company conviction secured and can show the officer had the knowledge and authority to act. Section 27 does not distinguish between hazard types. An officer's duty to "acquire and keep up to date knowledge of WHS matters" and ensure the business "uses appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risk" applies exactly as much to a workload, bullying, or role-clarity risk as it does to a chemical exposure. The only reason no psychosocial prosecution has used section 27(1) yet is that no psychosocial prosecution has reached a NSW court since the Code became enforceable. That's a timing gap, not a legal one. So what would an officer's "reasonable steps" defence actually look like against a psychosocial finding? The same as it looks for a chemical exposure: a documented risk assessment, named controls, a review date, and evidence the officer engaged with it personally rather than delegating it and forgetting. A folder of policies isn't that evidence. A dated risk register with an officer's name against a review cycle is. Closing that gap before the first psychosocial section 27(1) case lands, not after, is the whole argument for treating documentation as a standing discipline rather than something assembled once a notice arrives.